Author: Ryan

Installing Boxee turns your computer into an incredible HTPC. These instructions will help you get it up and running on Ubuntu. Update: Boxee has recently made the latest version (9.20) of their software available for Ubuntu 64 and 32-bit. If you are installing this new version simply download the deb package off their website directly and install it. The instructions below pertain to older Boxee versions < 9.20 Start by downloading the repository off the website. Since the 32-bit repository is the only one available simply adding it to your sources.list will not work. $ wget http://apt.boxee.tv/dists/jaunty/main/binary-i386/Packages.gz Find the latest…

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The Dell Inspiron Zino HD is the perfect machine if you are looking to build an Ubuntu Linux based HTPC. At the time of this post the Zino can be purchased with either Windows 7 or Ubuntu linux 9.04. I decided to go with Windows 7 and install Ubuntu 9.10 64-bit karmic on my own in a dual boot configuration. This article will cover all the steps necessary to get Ubuntu up and running. The easiest way to setup a dual boot configuration is to reinstall Windows 7 first with the included OS DVD and then Ubuntu second. When installing…

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AndroidNexus.com will be a site geared towards the Google Android operating system based on the Linux kernel.  I plan on covering topics including the Android Open Source Project as well as application development with the Android SDK. For good measure there should be plenty of information about specific applications and phones as well. Keep an eye out for future updates!

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By default Ubuntu doesn’t install the manual pages used for Linux software development which is an invaluable reference for any system developer. These man pages describe the Linux programming interface including Linux system calls as well as system library calls. To install these man pages simply install the manpages-dev package. $ sudo apt-get install manpages-dev You can also install the POSIX specific interfaces by installing the manpages-posix-dev package. $ sudo apt-get install manpages-posix-dev

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The PS3 Sixaxis and DualShock3 bluetooth controllers are a great for gaming on your PS3 but will work just as well under Linux. With this guide you will be able to configure them to work on your Ubuntu Linux 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) PC in USB as well as wireless bluetooth mode. There are a variety of solutions out there but they are either overly complex, or because of the ever changing state of Linux bluetooth support, they are somewhat outdated. The advantage of this solution is that it is simple, and requires only slight modification to the default versions of…

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You may already be familiar with NFS and Samba for sharing files over a network. While these are both great distributed filesystem solutions, they require extra configuration and setup overhead in order to get them to work. If you want quick and easy access to a remote filesystem then SSHFS may be your best shot. SSHFS (Secure SHell FileSystem) is a file system for Linux capable of operating on files on a remote computer using just a secure shell login. It is based on sftp (SSH File Transfer Protocol). Setup is easy on the server side, since most servers support…

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Setting up a NFS server on Gentoo doesn’t have to be difficult. Here I will explain how to setup a basic NFS server in just a few steps. The fist step is to become root. $ su – Your Gentoo kernel must be compiled with support for both NFS server and client. You can check for this in a couple ways. If you manually built your kernel you can do the following to check for support. # cd /usr/src/linux # make menuconfig The following options should be enabled in the kernel. File Systems —> Network File Systems —> NFS file…

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A strange issue has been identified in Ubuntu where video takes on a blue colored tint. Other descriptions of the problem include inverted colors, blue skin tones, or distorted video hues. The problems have been reproduced with Totem (Gstreamer), Totem (Xine), Mplayer, as well as VLC and other players. The common theme with this bug seems to be the use of the Nvidia closed source drivers. Update 3/11/2011: The problem has been isolated to the interaction between the proprietary NVIDIA driver and the X video extension. The fix should now restore correct video color to all players. Here is an…

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An ISO image is an archive file (disk image) of an optical disc using a conventional ISO (International Organization for Standardization) format. ISO image files typically have a file extension of .ISO. Many times is convenient to mount an ISO file directly instead of burning it to a CD first. Not only does this save on wasted CDs/DVDs, but allows much faster access to the ISO since it is on the hard disk itself. Create the directory or mount point for the ISO. $ sudo mkdir -p /mnt/disk Use the mount command to mount the ISO $ sudo mount -o…

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Screen may be the most useful Linux applications when it comes to getting things done through the terminal. This custom screenrc configuration file will provide you with a permanent caption line at the bottom of each window. This caption line will enable you to easily keep track of each terminal window and provide other helpful information such as host and current time. When screen is invoked, it executes initialization commands from the files “/etc/screenrc” and “.screenrc” in the user’s home directory. Simply create a file in your home directory with vim or some other editor. $ vim ~/.screenrc And place…

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