Thameera's MicroBlog

It was a bumpy ride. Unity, Gnome 2, LXDE and KDE. I tried almost all the popular environments (except XFCE, of which I had heard a lot of bad things).

KDE is perhaps the most attractive of these, but, sadly, it’s too heavy for a netbook. LXDE is light-weight indeed, but I had trouble running several applications with it. For example I couldn’t get gPodder to work no matter how hard I tried, and ibus was buggy.

I was going to test run Gnome 3 but @kau_mad said otherwise, so gave up. Which left me with two options: Unity and Gnome 2.

Unity was originally intended for netbooks. (This was the default environment in Ubuntu Netbook Remix, remember?) Stuff like global menu bars were made with small screens in mind. Unity works, but I found it a bit too sluggish. The solution? Unity-2D.

Unity-2D is a clone of Unity intended for low power computers like netbooks. While Unity has been written with GTK, Unity-2D uses the QT toolkit. It doesn’t require GPU acceleration , something which netbooks and other low-end machines can’t provide.

To install Unity-2D in Ubuntu 11.04, all you have to do is to install the package “unity-2d-default-settings” from the Software Center. Log out and choose Unity-2D as the desktop environment. The interface is quite similar to Unity, but it may not be as slick as Unity is. For example you won’t get those lovely fading effects. However it’s able to provide you with the maximum possible Unity experience.

So I wanted to get some first hand experience on KDE. To install KDE in Ubuntu what you need is to install the kde-desktop (or  kde-netbook in my case) package from the repos. Once installed, log out and choose KDE before logging in.

KDE is the sex! There’s absolutely nothing so beautiful like it! Due to the restrictions in my netbook most of the effects won’t work for me, but still it looks marvelous. Sad to find that it’s being underrated in the FOSS world.

KDE’s however not so sweet with resources. The environment is heavy, perhaps even heavier than gnome. But I can’t make up my mind to leave it and go back to LXDE. The performance loss is quite worth the sacrifice, if you ask me.

So I had to install Xilinx 13.1 for our final year project and only the Windows version was available. Which means I had to install Windows 7 in the laptop alongside Ubuntu.

Oh, the woes in Windows. As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, you get totally bewildered and frustrated in this proprietary operating system.

First, there’s no Compiz. The desktop and windows look pretty ugly. Thanks  to aero the ugliness is reduced a bit.

Then there are no multiple workspaces. Can you just imagine? Having to work in a single desktop?! But thankfully there’s a solution available, albeit a less-than-perfect answer to the problem. You can install this little piece of software and it will give you something similar to multiple desktops. Not as good or native as in linux anyway.

And the next problem was the lack of double-finger scrolling. Again a small software comes to the rescue. Still it’s less-than-perfect.

Viruses? Yes, you have to be wary of those creatures in this less secure operating system. Installed Microsoft Security Essentials just in case.

I hold no grudge against Windows. I’ve used it since the 95 version and I won’t hesitate to say it’s a good operating system. It’s just that you don’t get the good feel or ease you get in linux. Hope they learn from peers like linux and OS X and improve the OS in the upcoming versions at least.

This friend of mine had installed Windows and Fedora side by side on his laptop and wanted to remove the Fedora installation. Removing Fedora is quite easy. All you have to do is to go to Disk Management from Windows (Run -> diskmgmt.msc), find the Fedora partitions, delete them and format as new drives.
However, this also removes the MBR of the machine. To restore the MBR, the accepted method is to use a Windows CD. We didn’t have that luxury. Fortunately we had a Ubuntu Live USB in hand.

The method to fix the MBR is:
1. Boot the machine using the Live USB/CD.
2. Install lilo

sudo apt-get install lilo

3. Fix the MBR using lilo using the command:

sudo lilo -M /dev/sda mbr

Works like a charm!

I was taken by surprise when I found out that I could not play MIDI audio in my Ubuntu box. Apparently it has to do with your sound card. But still..!

One of the simplest methods to play a midi file in Ubuntu is to install timidity. Yeah, lovely name that.

sudo apt-get install timidity timidity-interfaces-extra

You can play a midi file directly from the command timidity followed by the file name. For example,

timidity awesometune.mid

Or, if you want a GUI, you can simply type

timidity -ig

and an old-fashioned window will pop up.

Happy listening!

SCID is a free, cross-platform chess database application. Can be used to edit PGN files and do loads of other stuff.

Unfortunately there is no PPA or deb files available to install the app in Ubuntu, so you have to get the tarball available at the site and install manually. If you try to configure the tarball you’ll get an error saying that it cannot find Tcl and Tk in the system, even though you have Tcl/Tk installed. The reason is you need to have the developer channels of Tcl/Tk installed for SCID.

Here’s how to install SCID in Ubuntu:

1. Install Tcl/Tk developer channels using the command:

sudo apt-get install tcl8.5-dev tk8.5-dev

(8.5 is the latest release)

2. Download the SCID tarball and extract in a temporary location

3. Go to the extracted location in a terminal and enter the following commands:

./configure BINDIR=/usr/local/bin

sudo make install

To run SCID, press Alt+F2, type scid and press enter.

In the Visual Effects tab in Ubuntu (System -> Preferences -> Appearance -> Visual Effects), there’s a neat little option called ‘Custom’ which can be used to tweak most compiz-related settings. It can be used to change the animations (eg: window closing animation),  configure the desktop wall/cube, assign commands to windows edges, and such.

This option doesn’t come pre-installed with Ubuntu, so if you’re missing it all you have to do is installing the Simple CompizConfig Settings Manager or simple-ccsm.

sudo apt-get install simple-ccsm

Now go to the Appearance settings dialog and you’ll find the new Custom option in the Visual Effects tab.

I explained the method to install Xilinx in a previous post, but that method only works for 32 bit systems. If you followed that procedure in a 64 bit machine it will install you’d not be able to compile projects.

Installing Xilinx for 64 bit linux is quite like the 32 bit method, only that you have to set your working directory to bin/lin64 in your Xilinx ISE directory. There’s a similar setup in this directory for 64 bit machines. So the steps to follow would be,

sudo ./setup

. settings64.sh

Notice that you have to run the settings64.sh file instead of the settings32.sh

My laptop’s power pack is broken. Gave it to a repair place, but there’s little hope. A new one would cost at least 3.5k.
So I move to the desktop computer which the others of the family use. It’s evil, it runs Windows XP.
First, you have to manually open an app and connect to the internet, while Ubuntu automatically connects once plugged in.
Once connected, it started downloading something. I was baffled for some time until I found out it was updating the antivirus. Antivirus! And you don’t have multiple workspaces to work in.
For the work I was going to do, I wanted to keep an instance of Notepad always on top. But apparently there’s no option when you right click on the title bar.
I turned off the computer and wrote this blog post from the phone.