I’m probably wrong and everything, but last night I got an update of Firefox 3 thru the Synaptic package manager on Ubuntu Hardy and now it sort of looks like it’s out early.

Any ideas?

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,

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,

After grabbing and installing Ubuntu 8.04 I then had to put together and setup the baby, luckily I wrote down most of everything I did in case I’d have to do it again and to help out you guys.

What follows are my findings and what I did to fix them. The machine I used is an HP Pavillion dv2000 model dv2742 special edition. It’s got a built-in intel graphics card, 3gb memory, sata 250gb drive, wifi, bluetooth and an intel dual core 2 processor.

I installed the o/s using the 64-bit edition of Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron, all what you see below are workable settings which provided the right setup; hope they help your situation if you go down this route.

Update System

First port of call, check for any new updates post-install,

sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude upgrade

Dependencies / Software / Setup

Next, install Ruby, FlashPlayer, GCC Compiler, MySQL, JAVA, SqlLite,

sudo aptitude install mysql-server flashplugin-nonfree ruby-full libsqlite3-dev build-essential libmysqlclient15-dev sun-java6-jdk

Volume Mixer,

sudo aptitude install gnome-alsamixer

ImageMagick,

sudo aptitude install imagemagick

Ruby Gem Handler

I could get GEM from the repositories but because with each new update it breaks away from the in-built Linux installer it’s best to install it from source,

wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/34638/rubygems-1.1.0.tgz 
tar xzvf rubygems-1.1.0.tgz
cd rubygems-1.1.0
sudo ruby setup.rb
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/gem1.8 /usr/bin/gem

Had problems updating the GEM system initally, so logged in as root to finish it off,

su root 
sudo gem update --system

Now when you type gem –version you should see GEM ready to roll,

Gem Libraries

The slow bit, ran this as root just to make sure it worked,

gem install rails
gem install rake
gem install mongrel
gem install mongrel_cluster
gem install thin
gem install capistrano
gem install mysql
gem install termios
gem install sqlite3-ruby
gem install mini_magick

VLC + GIT

Next VLC to play videos,

sudo aptitude install vlc

Transmission for torrents, most important bit,

sudo aptitude install transmission

And GIT to handle code versioning,

sudo aptitude install git-core

Firefox + MS Fonts

Next I need Firebug for Firefox 3. Ubuntu 8.04 comes with Firefox 3 beta 5, the one available thru Tools / Add-ons won’t work with it; but thankfully it’s in the repositories

sudo aptitude install firebug

And you’ll probably need Microsoft Fonts later down the line,

sudo aptitude install msttcorefonts

Pimp GEDIT

The default Gnome Text Editor Isn’t bad but let’s add some extra’s to really kick it in gear,

sudo aptitude install gedit-plugins

And tweak it,

wget http://robzon.kapati.net/rails/rhtml.lang && sudo mv rhtml.lang /usr/share/gtksourceview-2.0/language-specs/
wget http://robzon.kapati.net/rails/rails.xml && sudo mv rails.xml /usr/share/mime/packages
sudo update-mime-database /usr/share/mime

Follow the guide here to get the TextMate look,

• Pimp GEDIT

Now when you open rails source files they’ll actually look right, thanks Grigio.

PostGreSql + Thunderbird

Pretty easy to install the most powerful db system, and the better email handler

sudo aptitude install postgresql thunderbird

Wine for Windows

Thanks to Google for their support the Wine project is going great, to get Windows software running natively on your machine,

First add the key,

wget -q http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/387EE263.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -

Then add the repository to your default repository list,

sudo wget http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/sources.list.d/hardy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/winehq.list

And finally install it,

sudo apt-get install wine

Effects

To enable compiz effects make sure Appearance / Visual Effects is set to ‘Extra’, then install the Advanced Effects Manager,

sudo aptitude install compizconfig-settings-manager

This will give you access to the 3d cube, skydome effect and a host of other cool addons.

My desktop dpi is set to 100dpi, fonts set to ‘Bitstream Vera Sans Roman 8pt’, with ‘Bitstream Vera Sans Bold 8pt’ for Windows Title; and ‘Liberation Mono 8pt’ for fixed width font. Using subpixel smoothing for LCD.

Sound

For my laptop (hp pavillion dv2000 / dv2742se model), i had to use a different sound mixer to make sure the quickplay volume and mute buttons talked to the sound system.

So from the top menu bar, System / Preferences / Sounds, then set the Default Mixer Tracks hander device to: Conexant CX20561 (hermosa) (oss mixer).

Cleanup

To get any temp files carried on from the install, clean with,

sudo aptitude clean

Job done, however I had a problem with Hibernate & Suspend which was lucky fixed with some advice from here

To install Skype on an AMD64 system, you’ll need the 32-bit libraries (if you’re distro is 32-bit, skip this),

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

Then download the appropriate package from…

• Skype Linux

Firefox should download it to your desktop so…

cd Desktop
sudo dpkg --install --force-architecture --force-depends skype-debian_2.0.0.68-1_i386.deb

And you’re done, with the Webcam driver installed and enabled you should now be able to make video calls too.

• Ubuntu Webcam Install