Update, 22 May, 2010. While the fix below was work­ing for a while, it even­tu­ally stopped as well. Then I came across this arti­cle at Apple. Evi­dently, when the bat­tery reports 0%, it is a hard­ware error and the Sys­tem Man­age­ment Con­troller must be reset. It’s quite sim­ple: Read the rest of this entry »

I just installed Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 on my white Mac­Book 2,1. Every­thing is work­ing flawlessly :)

I wanted to write this, though, to share how I got it work­ing, because there are many dif­fer­ing opin­ions on how to install Ubuntu as the only OS on a Mac. Read the rest of this entry »

AnandTech ran an inter­est­ing (and VERY thor­ough) review of Ubuntu 8.04. I wanted to high­light my favorite sec­tion.

Titled CPU Bench­marks, they test appli­ca­tions run­ning on both Win­dows Vista and Ubuntu. The amaz­ing thing is the appli­ca­tions run­ning on Ubuntu via Wine per­formed bet­ter than they did on Windows!

Let’s let that sink in for a moment…the open-source project writ­ten ½ by vol­un­teers and ½ by com­mer­cial inter­ests, intended to dupli­cate the Win­dows API on Linux, actu­ally out­per­forms the soft­ware it’s intended to mimic. That’s amaz­ing to me. Read the rest of this entry »

I am excited to see that gPH­PEdit is now under active devel­op­ment again. I downoaded the Feb 9, 2009 snap­shot and tried com­pil­ing it.

At first I was given the error that the fol­low­ing libraries were not installed:

gtk+-2.0
libgnomeui-2.0
gnome-vfs-2.0
libgtkhtml-2.0

So I ran these com­mands to install them:

sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev
sudo apt-get install libgnomeui-dev

Then nav­i­gate to the source direc­tory and run these com­mands in your terminal:

cd gphpedit
./configure
make
sudo make install

Here is gPH­PEdit 0.9.91 run­ning on Ubuntu 9.04 :)

gPH­PEdit 0.9.91 run­ning on Ubuntu 9.04

Recently I re-configured my setup for more con­ve­nient dual-booting between Mac OS & Ubuntu Linux. I cre­ated a com­mon hfs+ par­ti­tion that both Ubuntu and Mac OS share, and this is my main stor­age for my work.

It took a bit of finagling to get Ubuntu Linux writ­ing to the hfs+ drive, so I wanted to share my expe­ri­ence for those who might ben­e­fit from it.

Fur­ther­more, I expe­ri­enced a wierd issue where, while run­ning Ubuntu my com­puter improp­erly shut down, and the hfs+ drive was no longer write­able. Below is how I fixed that.

Setup

Mac OS Leop­ard on hfs+ jour­naled partition

Ubuntu 9.04 on ext4 partition

Com­mon hfs+ (unjour­naled) par­ti­tion for shar­ing data

Pre­pare Ubuntu

I found every­thing I needed to mount an hfs+ drive already installed on Ubuntu. But write sup­port was not work­ing be default. So I edited my /etc/fstab to include this as the last item, and it mounts the drive with read/write permissions.

/dev/sda3 /mnt/common hfsplus user,auto,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0

From what I found about fstab, here’s what all that means:

1. “/dev/sda3” is the path to the drive’s partition
2. “/mnt/common” is the loca­tion I want to mount the drive at
3. “hfs­plus” is the par­ti­tion type
4. “user” allows a nor­mal user (not just root) to mount this drive
5. “auto” means mount auto­mat­i­cally when booting
6. “uid” is my user’s id, allow­ing it access to this mount point
7. “gid” is my user’s group id, allow­ing that group access to this mount point
8. The two zeros at the end…
   1. zero 1 is the dump option: “should this be backed up?” Zero means “no”
   2. zero 2 is the order in which fsck should check the filesys­tems. Zero means “don’t check”

One caveat, I had to adjust the per­mis­sions on all files that I want read & write access to in both oper­at­ing sys­tems. Oth­er­wise, when Ubuntu saved a file, OS X only had read per­mis­sion, and vise-versa.

Here’s the com­mand that recur­sively sets per­mis­sions an all files in the com­mon drive to 777:

sudo chmod -R 777 /mnt/common

Fix hfs+ read/write when improp­erly shut down

Once, after hiber­nat­ing my com­puter in Ubuntu, it would not wake up, so I force-restarted. Evi­dently this caused the com­mon par­ti­tion to have an improperly-unmounted flag that would not let Ubuntu write to it. After boot­ing into OS X and restart­ing into Ubuntu, it worked. I guess boot­ing into Mac OS reset that flag…but I’m not entirely sure. But it did fix my read/write access to my hfs+ partition :)

Here is a great arti­cle describ­ing how the French Police saved money with Ubuntu. It starts out by saying

“France’s Gen­darmerie Nationale, the country’s national police force, says it has saved mil­lions of dol­lars by migrat­ing its desk­top soft­ware infra­struc­ture away from Microsoft Win­dows and replac­ing it with the Ubuntu Linux distribution.”

“…has saved up to €50 mil­lion on licens­ing and main­te­nance costs as a result of the migra­tion strategy”

“The Gen­darmerie migra­tion also demon­strates the sig­nif­i­cant cost sav­ings that gov­ern­ments can get from adopt­ing open source soft­ware. As the global finan­cial down­turn con­tin­ues to put pres­sure on bud­gets, gov­ern­ments are going to increas­ingly look to open source soft­ware as a way to cut IT costs. We have recently seen moves in this direc­tion from Canada and the UK.”

I found it inter­est­ing that they state the biggest dif­fer­ence between Ubuntu and Win­dows, from their point of view, was the icons

“Mov­ing from XP to Ubuntu, how­ever, proved very easy. The two biggest dif­fer­ences are the icons and the games. Games are not our priority.”

I am also very encour­aged that they’re con­cerned about open stan­dards. I wish more busi­nesses and insti­tu­tions though this way and I hope the Gendarmerie’s exam­ple pro­mul­gate open standards.

“[The Gendarmerie] has found that open source soft­ware is bet­ter at han­dling open standards.”

I have been reg­u­larly using Ubuntu Linux and Mac OS X Leop­ard on my iMac and Mac­Book for about a year now. Dur­ing that time I have found Linux tools to com­ple­ment my Mac tools so I can do just about every­thing I need on either sys­tem. Given that, I thought it would be inter­est­ing to com­pare the cost of each system.

Mac Software: $3,622.55
Linux Soft­ware: $0.00

Humor works. Humor + Neg­a­tiv­ity works even bet­ter. Here’s how I found out.

While this post will cer­tainly not become viral, I have been study­ing viral mar­ket­ing and wanted to share about a small exper­i­ment I did. I read a book called World Wide Rave: Cre­at­ing Trig­gers that Get Mil­lions of Peo­ple to Spread Your Ideas and Share Your Sto­ries (Kin­dle Edi­tion) in which the author states

It turns out peo­ple react to neg­a­tives. Sev­eral years ago, I worked on a site where we included a link “For Exec­u­tives Only,” which gen­er­ated more traf­fic than other links. Words like worst, don’t, and only are inter­est­ing, and peo­ple want to know what’s there.

This got my cre­ative juices flow­ing and I decided to exper­i­ment. Con­tin­u­ing to read in the World Wide Rave we see an exam­ple of a blog­ger, Mark Hin­kle, who did a satir­i­cal arti­cle on Ubuntu. Just so hap­pens I have a blog on Ubuntu. I copied the idea by mak­ing a neg­a­tive arti­cle of “Top 10 Rea­sons I’ll Never Use Ubuntu.” This list was not seri­ous at all, actu­ally it was a list of 10 things I love about Ubuntu. And it was hastily writ­ten, jot­ted down in about 10 minutes.

It worked! The blog nor­mally receives 200 vis­i­tors per day. After 20 hours of my post being live it had 2764 vis­i­tors. It had been picked up by a cou­ple of Linux blogs, it got dugg, it was Stum­bled, it was twit­tered, it made it into Ubuntu forums, and it sparked some rather inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tions in comments.

Only one other time have I had that kind of suc­cess on my Ubuntu blog, and it was an arti­cle that I spent hours on.

Do you have any sto­ries or insights as to how Ubuntu has made you more pro­duc­tive? Would you like to share your insights? I am look­ing for peo­ple who have thoughts that would help new­com­ers and sea­soned users alike. Any­thing that can help Ubuntu users become more pro­duc­tive. Whether its with the Ubuntu OS itself, or other soft­ware tools you run on Ubuntu. Inter­ested? Drop me a line at ubun­tupro­duc­tiv­ity [at] gmail [dot] com.

The only real require­ment is your post must be rel­e­vant to the Ubuntu com­mu­nity and this blog’s focus on pro­duc­tiv­ity. Some ideas are:

• Short­cuts
• Tips and tricks
• Resources
• Soft­ware tools
• Meth­ods and workflows

Just to be up front about it, there’s no money involved. I just do this for fun and edu­ca­tion. Your reward will be sim­i­lar, includ­ing the enjoy­ment of shar­ing your expe­ri­ence + a link to your blog/site/whatever you want.

I did not know this until recently — it is pos­si­ble to con­fig­ure the java engine used by Ubuntu by run­ning this command:

sudo update-alternatives –con­fig java

You will be asked to select from a list of avail­able java engines. Sim­ply type in the num­ber of your choice and hit enter.

Choos­ing the java engine on Ubuntu 8.10