I am a programmer and I can’t do without a clipboard manager. If you have never used a clipboard manager before, you don’t know what a great tool you are missing. GPaste is an excellent clipboard tool for Gnome-Shell, however it is neither available in Ubuntu repository, nor in any PPA (as of now). Here is how you can compile it. Open up the terminal and get going.

Install Dependencies

sudo apt-get install libgtk-3-dev libglib2.0-dev intltool automake autoconf valac git libdee-dev gnome-tweak-tool

Download Source

cd; git clone https://github.com/Keruspe/GPaste.git

Compile and Install

cd;cd GPaste
./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install

Restart Gnome-Shell
To restart, press Alt+F2, enter ‘r’ (without quotes) and press enter.

Enable GPaste Extension
To enable extension, open up Alt+F2>gnome-tweak-tool (or Activities>Applications>Other>Advanced Settings) and enable GPaste under Shell Extensions.

You should now see GPaste icon in the top panel. However, it may give the following error message:

(Couldn’t connect to GPaste daemon)

For this, add the GPaste daemon in startup as “gpaste –daemon” in StartUP applications and reboot.

I have just installed Gnome 3 in Ubuntu 11.10 Onieric Ocelot. In Gnome-Shell interface, there are no title bar controls for minimize, maximize/restore. To enable them, open up the terminal and type in (or copy/paste) the following command:

gconftool-2 --set /desktop/gnome/shell/windows/button_layout --type string close,minimize,maximize:

Now, press Alt+F2, type in “r” without quotes and press enter. This will reload Gnome-Shell and the changes will come into effect.

Note: The above will set the buttons in left side as in Ubuntu default theme (or Mac OS X). To place them in the right (like Gnome 2 default, Windows), use the following command instead:

gconftool-2 --set /desktop/gnome/shell/windows/button_layout --type string :minimize,maximize,close

Hope this helps.

I have installed Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot on my laptop. I had been using Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal on it and since I use this PC for work, I was reluctant in installing Gnome-Shell from PPA. But since Gnome-Shell is available in official repositories, I decided to give it a go. To install, just open Ubuntu Software Center, search for Gnome-Shell and click “Install”. After installation is complete, log out and when logging back in, select Gnome (see screenshot below).

When trying to purge Gnome3 PPA, I had to cancel the ppa-purge process and when I tried to run the same, I got the following message:

Updating packages lists
PPA to be removed: gnome3-team gnome3
Warning: Could not find package list for PPA: gnome3-team gnome3

I had to add the PPA again to be able to successfully run ppa-purge. For example, if your ppa is ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3, you should run the following:

apt-add-repository ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3

Then you should be able to run ppa-purge again.

Note: In my case, I also got the following error after adding the PPA again:

E: Type ‘ain’ is not known on line 3 in source list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/gnome3-team-gnome3-natty.list
E: The list of sources could not be read.
Warning: apt-get update failed for some reason
PPA to be removed: gnome3-team gnome3
Warning: Could not find package list for PPA: gnome3-team gnome3

This seems to be some bug. I had to manually edit /etc/apt/sources.list.d/gnome3-team-gnome3-natty.list and remove the line containing ‘ain’. This should not be required in your case.

If this does not work, you should check if the PPA exists at all and if you have packages installed from that PPA.

I have installed sun-java-jre/jdk on my Ubuntu and Fedora. I am using svn for my project and have been running it well with my old Fedora 15 installation on my old PC. However, recently I installed Fedora on my other machine and installed Netbeans 7.0.1 on top of sun-java. Fedora did not handle graphics very well, so I installed Ubuntu alongside as well. But every time I tried to access subversion functionality from Netbeans, I got the following error:

org.tigris.subversion.javahl.ClientException: java.io.IOException: Duplicate extensions not allowed
OPTIONS request failed on ‘/relative/path/to/some/project/directory’

This happened in both of my newer installations, Fedora 15 and Ubuntu 11.04, both with Netbeans 7.0.1. I tried several things but all in vain. Finally, when searching for installed Java related packages in my old machine (where subversion always worked), I found the required package. The cryptic error message will simply stop appearing and Netbeans subversion will start working after the installation of svn client adapter for Netbeans. Here is how you can do it from the terminal:

For Fedora:

su -c 'yum install netbeans-svnclientadapter'

For Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install libnb-svnclientadapter-java

Hope this helps.

Having video and sound issues with Fedora 15, I decided to try out Natty on my HP Pavilion G4 1009tx. Surprisingly, sound and 3D effects ran great with Intel onboard graphics so I installed it onto the Hard drive. In all excitement, I decided to try out proprietary ATI drivers for the switchable dedicated AMD Radeon HD 6470M graphics. However, when I rebooted, it would not boot. It seems that plymouth crashes and system ends up with a black screen. So, I decided to remove fglrx and keep on using Intel card but it seems that I can’t even boot into recovery mode. So, I had to remove fglrx and make the system usable again using the Live CD and chroot. Here is how I did it.

Note: If you are trying to get the fglrx to work, you should look somewhere else. I just removed fglrx and decided not to use it (for now at least).

First, I booted into the Live Ubuntu Desktop. Then, I opened the terminal and created a directory for mounting everything:

sudo mkdir /mnt/root

Then I mounted the root partition.

sudo mount /dev/sda7 /mnt/root

Please note that my installation’s root partition is /dev/sda7. In your case, it can be something else. Since I have a separate home partition (/dev/sda8), I mounted it too, just in case. You can skip this if you don’t have a dedicated home partition.

sudo mount /dev/sda8 /mnt/root/home

You should also mount other drives if you have dedicated partitions for other directories (for /boot perhaps?).

Then, I mounted other required directories.

sudo mount -o bind /dev /mnt/root/dev
sudo mount -o bind /proc /mnt/root/proc
sudo mount -o bind /sys /mnt/root/sys

Then, I chrooted to the mounted root:

sudo chroot /mnt/root

Now, I got into the root of my installed Ubuntu. Then I just had to run the following to remove fglrx:

apt-get remove fglrx

UPDATE 1:
(ignore this, see UPDATE 2 below)
After upgrading xserver-xorg-video-all, xserver-xorg-video-ati and xserver-xorg-video-radeon, the screen went blank again after reboot. So, I had to downgrade the packages by downloading from repos. Here is how you can do it too (I have included the packages in an archive, please note that you need an active Internet connection for the following):

dhclient
cd /tmp
wget http://www.khattam.info/wp-content/uploads/xserver-ati-old.tar.gz
tar xzvf xserver-ati-old.tar.gz
dpkg -i xserver-xorg-video-radeon_6.14.0-0ubuntu4_i386.deb xserver-xorg-video-ati_6.14.0-0ubuntu4_i386.deb xserver-xorg-video-all_1%3a7.6+4ubuntu3_i386.deb

UPDATE 2:
This blank screen issue would still reappear once in a while and the laptop would get very hot over prolonged usage, so I decided to go for a slightly different solution. I removedxserver-xorg-video-radeon and xserver-xorg-video-ati, blacklisted the radeon module and disabled it via vgaswitcheroo. Here is how I did it:
Remove ATI Radeon drivers:

apt-get remove xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-radeon

Blacklist kernel module:
To disable kernel module, I opened the file /etc/modeprobe.d/blacklist.conf and add a line ‘blacklist radeon’. You can use nano to do this:

nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

Ctrl+O to save and Ctrl+X to exit nano.
Re-enable kernel module after startup and switch the card off:
To do this, I just added two lines before the line ‘exit 0′ in /etc/rc.local (you can use nano for this too) so that the file looks like the following:

#!/bin/sh -e
#
# rc.local
#
# This script is executed at the end of each multiuser runlevel.
# Make sure that the script will "exit 0" on success or any other
# value on error.
#
# In order to enable or disable this script just change the execution
# bits.
#
# By default this script does nothing.
 
modprobe radeon
chown USERNAME /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch
echo OFF > /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch
 
exit 0

In the file above, USERNAME is my login username. Don’t forget to replace USERNAME with your username before saving the file. (If you are not sure what your username is, just do this: ls /home/, you should see it in the name of the directory.)

When done, I just exited from the chrooted environment:

exit

Then, I unmounted everything:

sudo umount -a

(You’ll see some error messages, like device is busy, just ignore them)

Now, I am able to boot into the installed Ubuntu again. Hope this helps.

If you are trying to compile a gtk-3 application and if you don’t have development package installed here is the error you can get:

configure: error: Package requirements (gtk+-3.0 >= 3.0.0) were not met:

No package ‘gtk+-3.0′ found

Consider adjusting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable if you
installed software in a non-standard prefix.

Alternatively, you may set the environment variables GTK_CFLAGS
and GTK_LIBS to avoid the need to call pkg-config.
See the pkg-config man page for more details.

If you encounter this error in Fedora, you should install gtk3-devel. In terminal, type in the following:

su -c 'yum install gtk3-devel'

If you encounter this in Ubuntu, you should install libgtk-3-dev. To do so, type in the following in terminal:

sudo apt-get install libgtk-3-dev

Hope this helps.

Linux Kernel 3.0 RC 1 was recently released. Although it does not have real changes to anything, but is just a renaming of 2.6.40, however, you may want to install it for testing and using it if it works good for you in your Ubuntu Natty installation. It has bug fixes and additional drivers so it may solve problems. However, it may also introduce new problems, so be careful not to remove the other kernel (2.6.38) after installing it. This tutorial also contains instructions to remove it safely, so read along. Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot will be released with kernel 3.0.

As of writing this, only amd64 (64 bit version) of the kernel is available in Kernel PPA, so if you are using 32-bit, it will not work for you. However, if you find i386 builds in the kernel ppa, you can install it. (UPDATE: Now both 32-bit and 64-bit versions are available)

First of all, download the debs from Kernel PPA. Then install in this order:
linux-headers
linux-headers-generic
linux-image

Once installation is done, reboot and Ubuntu should boot into 3.0 by default. If everything works right, you may want to keep it, however, if it does not, don’t worry, just reboot and select one of the previous versions and boot into it. Then open up synaptic, search for linux-headers-3 and linux-image-3 and remove the 3.0 versions.

If you are reading this after other versions are released, you may want to check out kernel ppa.

Firefox 4 has been released recently and it is not available via update manager in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx and 10.10 Maverick Meerkat. The Ubuntu Mozilla Daily Build PPA provides it but it always the latest daily build and not the stable version.

For stable version, you can use Firefox Stable PPA. To install the PPA in Lucid or Maverick, just launch Synaptic (System>Administration>Synaptic Package Manager) and then go to Settings>Repositories>Other Software. Now click Add and paste in the following:

ppa:mozillateam/firefox-stable

Close the Repositories window and then click reload. When it is done, search for firefox-4.0-gnome-support and mark it for installation. It should mark other required packages. Apply and wait for installation to finish.

If you have used Unetbootin to setup a Live Ubuntu Environment, you will find that the partition containing the Unetbootin files will be mounted on /cdrom as read-only, which means, even if you launch nautilus with gksu or sudo, you will not be able to make changes to the file-system. There is however, an easy workaround which involves remounting the filesystem with a single command. Open up the terminal and type in the following:

sudo mount /cdrom  -o rw,remount

Now, you should be able to write into the filesystem.