Posts Tagged Linux
How To Install Google SketchUp 7 with Wine in Ubuntu
Google SketchUp is a very popular, and free, CAD style application. So far so good, but the bad news is that it is written for Windows. The good news is that it will run under Wine with very little difficulty these days.
The first thing you must do is, of course, download SketchUp from: http://sketchup.google.com/intl/en/download/gsu.html. Next, you need to either install the latest version of Wine, or update your current installation of Wine to the most recent version. I recommend you use the Wine (Ubuntu) repo’s, how to add the repository is at: http://www.winehq.org/download/deb. To check your version of Wine, click Applications > Wine > Configure Wine, and click the ‘About’ tab. To get SketchUp working properly, it’s best to have at least 1.1.11 of Wine.
Full Circle magazine #24 released!
Full Circle
Issue #24
Full Circle - the independent magazine for the Ubuntu Linux community are proud to announce the release of our twenty-fourth issue. http://fullcirclemagazine.org Don't forget to give us a Digg/Reddit/Slashdot vote!
Will You Be Opening Pandoras Box Before Christmas?
Pandora - The Open Source Hand Held
You’ve never heard of the Pandora? OK, let me fill you in: it’s an open source, hand held, console running Linux. Just a hairs breadth bigger than a Nintendo DS this beast is far more powerful than the DS and PSP.
Today (Sun, 5th Oct) is the closing date if you want to pre-order one from the first batch. They’ll be released before Christmas. If you don’t get in today, you’ll have to wait until early 2009 for the second batch.
Some specs of this baby beast are:
- ARM® Cortex™-A8 600Mhz+ CPU running Linux
- 430-MHz TMS320C64x+™ DSP Core
- PowerVR SGX OpenGL 2.0 ES compliant 3D hardware
- 800×480 4.3″ 16.7 million colours touchscreen LCD
- Wifi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth & High Speed USB 2.0 Host
- Dual SDHC card slots & SVideo TV output
- Dual Analogue and Digital gaming controls
- 43 button QWERTY and numeric keypad
- Around 10+ Hours battery life
Test boards of the Pandora can already run a PSone emulator without breaking sweat and it’s SNES emulator is running so fast they have to hold it back! Similar to the GP2x (no relation) it has a TV-out which is excellent news for the plethora of emulators (and ROMs) it will have.
Lancelot – The KDE Menu Of Greatness
While browsing through my RSS feed of Linux.com I noticed a post about ‘Lancelot’ a new KDE menu/plasmoid. I kinda prefer the old style KDE menu but have been forcing myself to use the new menu to see if it really is crap, and it kinda is.
But Lancelot (below) is the best of both worlds!
If you open your package manager and type in ‘lancelot’ you should see the plasmoid mentioned in the results. If not, then you need to add the LaunchPad repo:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-members-kde4/ubuntu hardy main
Just install the Lancelot plasmoid then add it to your desktop or task bar.
Left is how the Lancelot menu looks. Down the left side is shortcuts to Documents, Contacts, Computer and Applications – clicking one of those changes what is displayed in the white area, at the moment it is showing Applications. In the left half of the white box is the list of Favourites, right side is the typical menu.
This is after clicking Graphics. The right side slides to the left and the right side displays what is under Graphics (GIMP, Xsane etc). To go back you click one of the blue tabs at the top of the white area.
Documents has handy links to Open Office applications and links to recently open documents.
Contacts has links to Kmail contacts (which I don’t have installed, I use Thunderbird) and also Kopete contacts.
And this is when you click the Computer icon on the left side of the menu. It lists the Fixed (drives), Places (home, root etc) and System (links to System Settings and a handy link to the KDE System Monitor.
All in all, I really like Lancelot, definitely keeping it installed as it’s a good compromise between the old menu and the new (pretty useless) menu. Oh, and it looks more pretty too. 
Give it a try!
BulletProofX my eye!
There I was, sitting having my breakfast this morning (tea and some porridge before work) when suddenly my KDE4 crashed. I mean crashed, corrupt looking screen, and needed a reboot.
PC reboots and I’m given the evil flashing-prompt-of-death ™. No login screen.
After much tinkering and typing of commands I eventually gets a God awful, 640×480 login screen! Not only that, but my ENTIRE glorious desktop is 640×480! What the HELL…?!
After work I sat down to fix the resolution glitch. It seemed as though my Kubuntu 8.04 had lost sight of my nVidia drivers. After several attempts to rectify the problem I eventually uninstalled the nVidia drivers and installed envyng which seemed to do the job, but I still had to manually alter the xorg.conf file to add some monitor info.
My question is this: what happened to ‘Bullet Proof X’? My X certainly wasn’t bullet proof!
I bothered spending the two hours getting the problem fixed because I love Kubuntu. But, it’s episodes like this that move people away from Linux and over too the dark side.
Had I not had my EEE PC and wireless internet I would have been utterly lost… 
When iPod Art Goes Awry
Having installed Kubuntu Hardy I dreaded the thought of having to recompile the libgpod library to get my iPod Classic (Black) working again. After installing Amarok I thought I’d try my iPod anyway.
Lo and behold, it worked!
Hoorah!
Well, it did. Until I actually flipped through the cover art and played some tracks did I notice that my cover art had gone awry. Drat!
After some tinkering I noticed in my Adept (package manager) that installed was libgpod3-nogtk, when I looked at the description for the library I noticed:
This version does not include artwork support
So I uninstalled it and installed the libgpod3 library.
All good!
Cover art is back (be sure to click the ipod icon at the top of Amarok, and choose Update Artwork). All is good between Amarok and iPods.
Above: the two libraries (and descriptions) in Adept
Flirting with a Puppy
This post is rather unique in that it is being written using SeaMonkey and within Puppy Linux. PupEEE to be exact, a customised version of Puppy 3 for the ASUS EEE.
The one problem with most distro’s on the EEE is getting the Wifi working, pupEEE made it dead easy. Opened the Network Wizard and it automaically recognised my ath0 as being wireless, next step was to configure it with my WEP key, test it and done! Hence why I can write this post! 
I’ve tested it with MP3 and XVID files and both worked flawlessly in the XINE player that is installed by default.
As ever with Puppy, it is blazingly fast, according to the memory status on the taskbar I have 243mb free from my initial 256mb RAM. In his case, pupEEE is initially loaded via USB stick but pretty much everything is in memory ready to rock so clicking any app makes it load almost instantly.
I’m very impressed with it and seriously thinking of ditching my eeeXubuntu install for this pupEEE.
UPDATE: eeeXubuntu now gone in favour of the stupidly fast pupEEE…
Google Calendar, why do you hate me so?!
*sob*
I’m have no luck at all this week end.
First was my KDE4 debacle and now an argument with Google Calendar!
I read a nice tutorial which was about getting Google Calendar working in Thunderbird.
‘That’d be handy’, says I.
Downloads the Lightning add-on for Thunderbird, which gives it a built in calendar, then downloaded the Provider add-on which allows Lightning to read and write to a Google calendar.
Installed Lightning first then Provider. Fine. Now to configure Provider. Gives it the Private XML URL and a calendar name and so on, click ‘Next’…
Nothing.
That’s odd.
*scratches head*
After a bit of detective work it seems that there’s a conflict between Lightning and Thunderbird due to Thunderbird having installed from the Gutsy repo’s and Lightning having come from the Mozilla site. Ah crap!
Time for Plan B: get Lightning from the Gutsy repo too!
Ah HA! See? I’m a smart cookie me…
Not so. The Lightning in the repo’s is v0.5. The Provider add-on needs v0.7 (the one on the Mozilla site).
Crap, crap and thrice CRAP.
I give up. No more Linux h4×0r1ng this weekend, screw it…
Bluetooth mobile phone and KBlueLock
While browsing Ubuntu Forums today I stumbled across a post asking what cool stuff a Bluetooth enabled mobile phone can do with Linux and discovered KBlueLock.
Of course, you need a Bluetooth dongle on your PC, I have a USB one.
In KDE I get a ‘K’ version of the Bluetooth logo in my task bar. If I right click it, I can choose KBlueLock.
The KDE Bluetooth menu (above)
KDE4 RC2 – First Impressions
I’d been looking forward to the release of KDE4 for months then the developers announced that it’d be a late Christmas present and the release date was now early January. Bummer.
Today I decided to download the Kubuntu with KDE4 Live CD to give it a whirl on my laptop, a Compaq NX9005.
I downloaded the ISO and burned it to CD, popped it in to my laptop and booted it up.
My first impression was that the task bar looked unfinished. It has a black background with a grey border which has a black border round it! To me it looked like that outer black border wasn’t supposed to be there but, hell, maybe it’s a ‘feature’ (hope to God it’s not!).
I was eager to try out some of the much talked about widgets so added the analogue clock first, easy. Looks nice too. I’m on a laptop so I’ll add the battery meter. It seems, according to the battery meter, that I don’t have a battery in my laptop, which is nothing short of a miracle since the laptop is not plugged in to the mains! So what about the nice post-it notes I’ve seen in screenshots. Nope. It’s just the bog standard flat looking post-it notes in the RC2 Live CD. Boooo!
Also:
- You’ll notice there are no screen shots in this brief review. This is due to the fact that there doesn’t seem to be any sign of KSnapshot on the Live CD.
- I was going to write this post in Konqueror in KDE4 but after clicking Konqueror I get the bouncing gear icon below the pointer, a shaded box in the launch bar then nothing. Couldn’t even load Konqueror!
- After poking about in the Settings I found the Window Effects settings and enabled them to give me drop shadows et all. Nope, all I got was a light grey screen with the shadow of the window that should be there, but wasn’t. Couldn’t see anything, couldn’t click anything.
After that I turned the laptop off and had to take in the fact that KDE4 RC2 isn’t ready for the masses. I hope, I PRAY, that the developers can get all these little quirks ironed out in time for the January release date.
I can tell you this much: I will NOT be installing it on release day! I’ll wait for some other guinea pigs to step forward first!
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