Custom Launchers with Ubuntu Unity 12.04

As you know I have been playing around with Ubuntu 12.04 lately. I found this article on creating custom launchers and Quicklists for Ubuntu unity. Being able to customize the main interface is key to any operating system. That has not always been an easy thing to do in Linux.



In the article it looks fairly easy to customize entries for specific applications. However I'm not sure you can customize an icon to launch random applications, but I intend to look into that. Anyway there are a lot of examples here you can work from and it's a very informative article.

Keyboard Shortcuts and Menu for Ubuntu Unity 11.10 and 12.04

I installed Ubuntu 12.04 this weekend. The Unity interface is not my favorite, but I guess we are pretty much stuck with it. Anyway, I found a couple things that make using it easier.



First, it took me a long time, but I found them. Here are the keyboard shortcuts for the Unity UI and the launcher.

https://help.ubuntu.com/11.10/ubuntu-help/shell-keyboard-shortcuts.html

These seem to be the most relevant shortcuts for controlling the UI.



I was also wishing I could get the menu back. Turns out you can with Classic Menu Indicator. Check out the details here: http://www.noobslab.com/2011/07/classic-menu-indicator-on-ubuntu-1104.html



I know they need to try to push the UI forward, but why do you have to take the menu away. It takes almost no screen real estate. These UI experiments, and that's what they are, should not be forced on us. Instead, it should be very easy for me to switch between the new interface and the old one. Both Windows and OS X do this, why can't Ubuntu?

Playing with Virtual Box

With my work begining on JDK 7, I went to download the latest version and realized I need to build the JDK from source. This seems like a perfect opportunity to give Virtual Box a try on OS X. I decided Ubuntu would be the best guest operating system to run, so I downloaded the software and and installed it.

To help me out I found this article on installing Ubuntu 9.04 on Virtual Box. Well everything worked great until I got to the part where I need to boot off the installer CDROM. When I tried to do that, I got this error: No Bootable Medium Found. So Googling around I found this support article which identified the fact it wasn't a problem with my boot disk. After a little sniffing around I found that you have to enable "Passthrough" for you CDROM drive for the boot disc to work. After doing that, the VM started up fine and I was installing! Yay!

The installation went very smooth. When you are done everything works, but the VM screen resolution was only 800x600. Virtual Box has a set of tools for fixing this sort of thing up like VMWare. But instead of being call the Virtual Box Tools, they are the Virtual Box Additions. Different name, same thing as VMware tools. However, the installer for this is much, much better than the VMWare tools. I just ran one script, and everything is installed. This was much easier than my last experience with VMWare and Ubuntu. Anyway, after the reboot, everything worked fine. The screen resolution is much better and the mouse no longer gets captured in the VM. The CPU utilization seems a tad higher then VMWare, but other than that, getting things up and running was pretty easy. I'm looking forward to playing around more.

Note: For full disclosure, I am an employee of Sun Microsystems which owns Virtual Box.

Portable USB Drive for Your Mac OSX Virtual Machines

I purchased one of these Western Digital My Passport drives last week for storing virtual machines.

A year or two back, I tried to put my VMWare images on portable Firewire drive I got from the Mac store. For whatever reason, these drives would work for a session or two and then corrupt the VM image. Since getting the My Passport USB drive, it has worked flawlessly. Fast, quiet, and small, a very nice combination of features. So I have posted the above link for anyone interested in doing the same thing. By the way, the drive is roughly the size of an iPhone (just a little bigger). I'm using VMWare Fusion 1.1.3, OS X Leopard 10.5.6, and Windows XP Pro SP3. I plan to put Ubuntu 8.10 on today. And I also plan to start experimenting with VirtualBox. It would be nice to not have to update my VMWare licenses. I think 1.1.3 cost me $100 for 2 licenses, it looks like with version 2, I would need to buy 3 licenses for $250 and I can't seem to find any upgrade discount.

Suse Linux Not Supported on HP 2133 (Per HP Support)

Well after getting transferred 3 times, the first two people didn't know what a 2133 was, I finally got someone who "attempted" to "solve" my problem. I explained that there seemed to be no network repository for packages installed with Suse Linux 10 and was wondering what the URL was for one I could use. This is the answer I got:

1. HP doesn't support this software (i.e., Suse Linux) so I can't really help you. (Interesting since HP installed the software on the system.)


2. What I should do is make an ISO of the Suse OS, copy that to my hard drive and then tell the installation software to use that.

I pointed out to the nice HP support lady that I received no Suse OS disk with the system. Where could I find such a disk? She restated 1 and reiterated 2.

Well at this point, there is no point in wasting anymore of her or my time. I thanked her and hung up. I had pretty low expectations but this exceeded them. Wow! Thanks a lot HP.

Since I have had the 2133, it seems to randomly lock up occasionally (its the software config, not the hardware). After one of these crashes, the Suse auto login stopped working and now I have to log in from the command prompt and do a "startx". In addition, the shutdown features no longer seem to work from inside the desktop (Have to drop to root. Shutdown and then do an init 0 from single user mode). This started happening while I was waiting on hold. It's setups like this that give Linux a bad name. Crap like this used to happen when I tried to use Redhat and never happen now that I use Ubuntu.

The moral of the story, only use a Linux that you can get community support for. Looks like its Ubuntu time. Installation instructions for Ubuntu and the HP2133 can be found at: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LaptopTestingTeam/HP2133. So much for trying Suse Linux. :(

I don't have time at the moment to setup Ubuntu. This will probably have to wait until early July when I have some vacation. But at least I know I will get support from that community.

Get Scroll Mouse to Work on Ubuntu 7.10 and VMWare Fusion

I'm using Ubuntu 7.10 running under VMWare Fusion on my Mac for a project. I couldn't get the scroll mouse to work. A bit perplexing given that it is a very generic Logitec Optical mouse.

Well I finally found a fix on this page: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/VMware/Tools.

Just change the Protocol line for your mouse device in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file to:
Options "Protocol" "ExplorerPS/2"

That seems to do the trick