Who couldn’t see this one coming. Since the acquisition of Sun by Oracle many people have been critical of Oracle’s handling of its newly acquired open source portfolio. In response to the the takeover OpenOffice project leaders and many contributers jumped ship and created a fork called LibreOffice under the umbrella of a European based non-profit organisation named the Document Foundation. According to The Document Foundation: “We believe that the Foundation is a key step for the evolution of the free office suite, as it liberates the development of the code and the evolution of the project from the constraints…
Author: Ryan
April 6th is finally here and those of us who have been keeping track of GNOME 3 development, you know that means the release of GNOME 3 desktop featuring Gnome Shell. GNOME 3 and Gnome Shell are a dramatic shift from what users have come to expect from GNOME 2. From the press release: Today, the GNOME Desktop project released GNOME 3.0, its most significant redesign of the computer experience in nine years. A revolutionary new user interface and new features for developers make this a historic moment for the free and open source desktop. Within GNOME 3, GNOME Shell…
Having the ability to hide the node title would seem like a feature that would be included in Drupal by default, unfortunately this is not the case. There have been a variety of suggestions on how to accomplish this task from creating a custom view to hacking the code on page.tpl.php itself. By far the best way I have found so far is the exclude_node_title module. http://drupal.org/project/exclude_node_title The exclude_node_title module provides a checkbox on node-edit pages for easier exclusion, or you can use the admin page to manually enter a list of node id’s to exclude title. This module is…
In contrast to GNOME 3’s Gnome Shell, Unity is Ubuntu’s take on the next generation of the desktop. In a previous article I went into detail on to install Gnome Shell in Ubuntu 10.10, now its time to do the same for Unity. There are a couple options to try unity on 10.10. The somewhat outdated Unity package in the repositories, and the latest daily build of the 2D Unity which lacks hardware acceleration. Unfortunately if you want the latest 3D accelerated version you will have to upgrade to Ubuntu 11.04 Natty. Install the Older Unity from the Repository The…
If you are using GNOME Shell with the latest Gnome 3 you may be wondering why you cannot Alt+Tab through your running applications. This is especially important since the panel and task bar no longer exists, making switching between applications especially difficult. To enable task switching with Alt+Tab you must configure metacity to support this with gconf-editor. Hit Alt+F2 and type gconf-editor. Now navigate to the switch_windows key binding. apps -> metacity -> global_keybindings -> switch_windows The default value is set to Disabled. Change this to <Alt>Tab instead. Now exit the editor and task switching should be enabled.
The release of GNOME Shell and GNOME 3 is fast approaching. Unfortunately for many the latest build is nearly unusable due to the slow animation speed and lack of mouse responsiveness. If you have an NVIDIA graphics card you may be in luck as the fix is fairly simple. You need to change to the latest recommended NVIDIA drivers. To install the recomended NVIDIA drivers navigate to the Additional Drivers menu. System -> Administration -> Additional Drivers You should have 2 proprietary drivers available. Choose the recommended driver which should be your second option. Now restart your system and launch…
Installing Google Earth is relatively straight forward. Download the Ubuntu/Debian package from Google, then click on the package to install it. Unfortunately when you attempt to run the program you may be hit with the following error. /usr/bin/google-earth: 43: ./googleearth-bin: not found This occurs because Google Earth has a dependency on /lib/ld-lsb.so.3, and unless this library is installed it won’t run. To correct this problem you will need to install the lsb-core package. $ sudo apt-get install lsb-core
GNOME Shell is a component of GNOME 3.0 which is the next generation of the GNOME Desktop Environment scheduled for release in April 2011. With the release fast approaching you may be eager to give it a try on your current Ubuntu 10.10 installation. There are currently two ways to install GNOME Shell. The easiest method is to install the gnome-shell package in the Ubuntu repository. Unfortunately the latest version supported in Ubuntu 10.10 is 2.32 which will give you a good taste of what to expect, but is outdated compared with the latest development releases (2.91.x series will become…
When pulling from a remote git repository located on shared hosting you will get the “git-upload-pack: command not found” error. A similar error occurs with the git-receive-pack when doing a push as well. This occurs when git is installed locally (in your home directory), and not system wide because git cannot locate these binaries. Normally this can be fixed by setting the $PATH environment variable to include the correct path to these binaries on the remote server. Unfortunately it will not work in this case as .bashrc is not sourced since the command is invoked in non-interactive mode via ssh.…
Since VirtualBox version 4.0 USB support can be enabled in the Open Source Edition (OSE) by installing the optional Oracle Extension Pack. You can find out how to install the Extension Pack here. If you have an earlier 3.2 version, you must make sure you have the Oracle closed source version of VirtualBox which was entirely separate from the OSE version. Once you have everything installed correctly you need to make sure you have the VirtualBox guest additions installed on your guest VM. To do this select Devices -> Install Guest Additions from the VM menu. Now you should have…