I just installed Ubuntu on a bunch of netbooks at work, and I have to say I think unity sucks. It might be ok soon, but it quickly frustrated me no end. Of course standard gnome just wastes too much screen real-estate, but with a couple of tweaks, your gnome desktop can be beautiful on a netbook.

Install Standard Desktop, not the desktop edition

Additional Softeware

Install Gnome-Do, Docky, Cardapio, appmenu, compizconfig-settings-manager

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cardapio-team/unstable
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install cardapio gnome-do docky indicator-applet-appmenu compizconfig-settings-manager

Right-click on the bootom panel and delete it.

Right-click on the gnome main menu, and delete it.

Add “Cardapio” and “Indicator Applet Appmenu” to the top panel

Run Docky, set it to auto-hide, I anchor mine to the right.

Run the Compiz Settings from Preferences, Under Window Decorations, set “Decoration Windows” to “!state=maxvirt”

Now you should have a minimum-screen real-estate desktop, that is still useable. Only problem is the is no un-maximize button, but “atl+f5″ will do that.

The Ubuntu repos have a upnp streaming server included in them called ushare. Install this:

# aptitude install ushare

And run it:

# ushare -x -c /directory/containing/media

-x: Xbox compliant profile
-c dir: Location of media

This works straight away, the problem is that even though the xbox can decode and play .avi files, it will not attempt to play them when streamed from ushare because of the mime type they are presented as. But we can recompile ushare to make it work

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I just worked out that Ubuntu won’t set the hostname according to what is returned from dhcp. This makes sense in some ways, but I was deploying a VM template and I wanted the hostname set by dhcp.

I am not using network-manager in the following examples. And honestly network-manager only makes life easier on a laptop, or desktop when operating wirelessly.

Make sure your network interface is set to dhcp, as network-manager is installed by default the relevant line may be commented out (also if your not using it, purge network-manager from your system). The relevant entries from my /etc/network/interfaces:


# The primary network interface
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp


Add an script in /etc/dhcp3/dhclient-exit-hooks.d. It should check if GDM is running, as after it has started up you should not change the hostname. My script read as follows:
/etc/dhcp3/dhclient-exit-hooks.d/set_hostname

# If you want to enable this script, change SETHOSTNAME to "yes"

SETHOSTNAME="yes"

if [ "$SETHOSTNAME" = "yes" ]; then
	if test -r /var/run/gdm.pid && ps -ef | grep $(cat /var/run/gdm.pid) | g
rep -q /usr/sbin/gdm ; then
	echo "$(date): GDM running, not changing host name"
	else
		hostname $new_host_name;
	fi
fi

That should be it. Though you may need to remove some incorrect entries from /etc/hosts, and remove /etc/hostname if the file contents are wrong.

I am loving Ubuntu 10.04. It is a genuinely brilliant release.

It has very good iPhone integration too. What it is still lacking is some of the utilities to make tethering easy. For USB tethering you can you can use Diego Giagio’s ipheth driver. I haven’t yet found a PPA for lucid, so you will need to compile from source.

For Bluetooth Tethering, Ubuntu comes with a nice new version of blueman, but it does not have the tight integration with network-manager.

To install blueman:
# apt-get install blueman

Pair your 2 devices. Pairing between blueman and the iphone generally works (even when it says it failed).

The trick to getting the network tether to work everytime is by starting the connection from your iphone. Once bluetooth is connected you can then right-click on you phone in blueman and access the network-point.

Because blueman and network-manager are not integrated you need one final commnand:

# dhcliet bnep0

Following on from last week’s post. We now need to setup the client.
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I did this on Debian but these instruction should work equally well for Ubuntu
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I just replaced my potop install with openvpn. It is relatively easy to set up, and once working it is more secure, and much. much faster. From my completely unscientific, anecdotal observations, about 3 times faster.

I will get around to writing a full howto in the next week or so.

I was given an Google ION to play with. It is the developer phone from the 2009 Google IO Conference, basically an HTC Magic with some developer stuff enabled. I really liked it.

The OS is nice, I upgraded to the OpenEclair ROM to give 2.1 a try. It was way to slow on the Magic but it gave me an appreciation for where google is going, and I would love a Nexus One. I also tried rolling my own android ROM and it was surprisingly easy.

I installed the Cyanogen ROM. It was nice. Fast and Stable. My problem is simple. The Magic has a fairly small screen and the default Android fonts are tiny. I can’t use it. After 5 minutes, my eyes hurt and I can no longer focus them. My eyes are crap, but I have no problem using the iPhone. So for the moment I am sticking with my iPhone. When the Nexus One finally makes it to Australia, I will get one I think.

Diego Giagio has built coded a Linux network driver to allow USB tethering with an unmodified iPhone. The source and more info can be found at: http://giagio.com/wiki/moin.cgi/iPhoneEthernetDriver.

For an easy to install Ubuntu package use this PPA, from pmcenery.

Gmail Notifier is the best gmail checker I have found. It makes use of libnotify and the Indicator Applet in GNOME, so it plugs in brilliantly with Karmic