While catching up on Doctor Who and Battlestar I started work trying to make my Ubuntu desktop just that bit more exciting, what you see above is the results of that, specs below;

Theme: moomex

Obtainable from: moomex

It’s a GTK 2.x theme so all you need is the Gnome desktop to use it. Open System / Preferences / Appearance and drag-n-drop the downloaded archive file into the Theme panel to install & activate it.

Font Settings

I’ve really grown to love the Liberation fonts so have combined them with the theme, you can read my guide to installing them here; above are the settings I’ve used.

Font Rendering

I tweaked the Font Rendering to make the display better, 100dpi and using the LCD Subpixel rendering, plus the Terminal window’s using transparency for that really glassy look (Green on Black).

Login Screen

Very Six-Feet-Under, you can grab this from here, it’s called Underground Ubuntu GDM, awesome work by ZombieHero.

Don’t mind the non-english text, it’s not permanent ;-)

Same deal here, open System / Administration / Login Window, then drag-n-drop the downloaded archive file into the Theme window to install it.

Sorry, the background I snagged from way back, think it might be from OSX Leopard but correct me if i’m wrong.

Bye for now,

IE 4 Linux

For cross-browser testing you can thankfully run IE6 (and 5/4) on Linux with the handy IE4Linux package.

• IE 4 Linux

Assuming you’ve got WINE you’ll also need cabextract, so add a repository to your distro,

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt hardy main

sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude install cabextract

wget http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/downloads/ies4linux-latest.tar.gz
tar zxvf ies4linux-latest.tar.gz
cd ies4linux-*
./ies4linux

Click to create icon on Desktop, it’ll run thru downloading packages and prefixes for Wine after which you should have IE on your Linux distro, which will be accessible (if you lose the desktop shortcut) from,

wine /bin/ie6

Safari / WebKit

Apple’s Safari browser is powered by the WebKit rendering engine, which thankfully is an opensource project and can be installed and tested against on your Linux machine via a few steps (yep, i’ve run thru this and it does work).

First get the dependencies,

sudo aptitude install autoconf automake libtool bison flex 
gperf libicu-dev build-essential libxt-dev libsqlite3-dev 
libjpeg62-dev libpng12-dev libglibmm-2.4-dev libgtk2.0-dev 
libcurl4-openssl-dev libxslt1-dev

Now goto http://nightly.webkit.org/ and grab the latest nightly build.

Unzip and Terminal into the archive dir and build the source,

./autogen.sh
./configure --enable-svg-experimental
make

Once that’s all done (which will take a while) you should now have a mini-WebKit browser in which to test against via…

./Programs/GtkLauncher

Navigate to the ACID3 website to test for standards compliance here http://acid3.acidtests.org/.

You should get 100/100, WebKit is pretty on when it comes to standards.

Over the weekend I went thru the process of setting up and installing the O/S on my private server preparing it for colocating. During this I wanted to bind the twin 1TB drives together in a RAID 1 configuration. Now the ASUS BIOS has the facility to do this at the hardware level but by doing so it ties you down to the physical setup you used to build it. However Linux provides the facility to do this at the software level without the ties which both alleviates you from the reliance and provides you with a more manageable alternative.

However for the uninitiated it’s nowhere as simple, what follows is a short guide to setup a simple twin drive software RAID solution; handle with care.

Fedora Unity

Before I start, get a copy of Fedora Unity. It’s basically Fedora 8 with more stable drivers and packages. I was speaking with one of my friends last week and he suggested using it for this very same reason, and although Debian does the same it is nowhere near as up-to-date.

• Fedora Unity

Grab the latest distro and burn it to a blank DVD, it’s about 4.3gb in size so if your downloading I’d leave it going for the night.

Software RAID with LINUX

Once you’ve burned it to DVD, boot your machine up and go thru the install process, this example obviously assumes you have 2 identical drives but there’s no stopping you using this to build a more advanced RAID setup later on.

Fedora has a pretty good partition manager which’ll help you out a lot, so when it prompts you to decide on your partition layout, choose ‘manual’ and we’ll begin;

• On the first drive,
• Create a software [raid] partition of 100mb (we’ll use this for /boot).

• Create a second software [raid] partition using all the remaining space.

• Select [raid] again and clone the first drive layout to the second drive.

Now next time you select [raid] it’ll give you the option to create a raid device, binding both discs together for each partition.

• So, create a [raid] device using the ext3 filesystem, mount point ‘/boot’, raid level 1, with raid members of 100mb in size (the two small partitions we created at the start), specify it to use both 100mb members (sda1 & sdb1).
• For the second partition I’m creating a LVM partition for the rest of the filesystem and the swapfile,

• So create a second [raid] device, file type LVM, raid level 1, using the two large members (sda2 & sdb2).

• Afterwards select [LVM] in the options panel and define your LVM group.

• Make an LVM volume group, e.g. ‘lvmgroup’.
• Next add a volume to the group, mount point ‘/’, file system ext3, lvm name ‘lvmroot’, using all the space (- 10gb for the swap partition).
• Next add a second volume to the lvm group, file system ‘swap’, lvm name ‘lvmswap’, using the remaining 10gb.

Click [finish] and you’re done.

Setup your network settings and go make a coffee, Fedora takes a while to build the partitions and install the packages but afterwards you should be left with a pretty stable setup.

I built two partitions (boot & lvm) because I was informed this provides a more stable setup, if one boot partition goes down the other should kick in, providing some degree of failover.

Also creating an LVM group makes your filesystem more manageable and not so hard-wired so if you do need to do changes down the line you can.

Beyond that I’m going to leave in a copy of the Fedora LiveCD so I can boot from that if things get really hairy, I’m going to run the system headless with SSH access so Gnome isn’t a necessity but for now it’ll help in the system build.

All the best,

Update

One thing to remember is to make sure /boot is marked as bootable on both discs otherwise if you remove one the other won’t kick in.

After the kr0w commented on my Ubuntu install post about the Emerald Theme Manager I had to try it out myself.

Installing

To get emerald and it’s dependencies do,

sudo aptitude install emerald

Enabling

Emerald isn’t enabled by default in Hardy, but you can enable it in the command line to try it out,

emerald --replace &

To keep it, edit the compiz-decorator file,

sudo nano /usr/bin/compiz-decorator

Look for the line…

USE_EMERALD="no"

Change this to yes, save and next time you boot you’ll be using the Emerald Theme Engine.

Keep losing top of windows?

After install Emerald and playing around with it I noticed I kept losing the top bar to my windows and corners, making things pretty unusable.

Found out I needed the Xgl Server which was missing in my build, you can check if this is the problem by,

compiz --replace

This runs checks to see whats available and the health of your compiz setup, mine told me I was missing Xgl.

Which was rectified by,

sudo aptitude install xserver-xgl

And a reboot, after which things started to work right.

Restarting X Server

If things start to break up you can restart the X windowing system with CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE.

Avant Window Manager

You can also get the Leopard-like dashboard by installing the AWN,

sudo aptitude install avant-window-navigator

This’ll really make people green with envy, however after installing that my double-tap issue came back with the touchpad, but that was quickly rectified by editing my xorg.conf file,

sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

And adding,

Option          "MaxTapTime"            "0"

Under the options for the Synaptics Touchpad, after a reboot I was back up and running,

Get with,

sudo aptitude install git-core

Simple Commands,

git init                   ...init repository
git add .                  ...add everything in dir to repository
git commit -a -m 'update'  ...add + commit changes
git diff                   ...show changes since last commit

git add [file]             ...add file
git rm [file]              ...remove file
git mv [file]              ...move file

Mirror Git Repository

rsync -azvCL --delete --progress 
   -e "ssh -i /home/[user]/.ssh/[mykey]" .git/* 
[user]@[user].strongspace.com:/home/[user]/[project]/.git/