I’m using Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat and I had been having a problem related to sound. Every time I started the computer, the volume was muted and I had to un-mute it as well as increase the volume. When I searched for a solution, it was brought to my attention that Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala and 10.04 Lucid Lynx also had this problem. I solved it by simply removing the buggy package alsa-utils which was responsible for this. Removing also-utils also removes ubuntu-desktop meta-package, but it does not matter since it is just a meta-package. To those who do not want to remove alsa-utils or ubuntu-desktop, some people in the Bug report have said that removing the line

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mute_and_zero_levels "$TARGET_CARD" || EXITSTATUS=1

from /etc/init.d/alsa-utils (to open, use gksu gedit /etc/init.d/alsa-utils) fixed the problem.

I had posted about flash plugin controls not working in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala 64 bit here. I had moved to Ubuntu 32 bit for quite sometime and recently made a move back to Ubuntu 64 bit. I found the same problem with flash plugin controls in Ubuntu 64 bit. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. I haven’t found any specific patterns to when it does and when it doesn’t. If someone has, please do share.

In my previous post regarding the issue, I had suggested the installation of Adobe flash player 64 bit version from Adobe Labs website. The solution worked fine for me and it seems for most of the others, but the plugin was experimental and when someone needed to update, it was not available via repositories. It has been provided in a launchpad ppa repository currently which can be added by adding ppa:sevenmachines/ppa to Repositories in Synaptic, but it seems it is not updated as of now and the latest version available in the ppa is 10.0.45.2 while Adobe has already released version 10.1rc4. But since the latest version is not recognized by youtube, I think we should stay with the version in the repository.

Simply open up synaptic and navigate to Settings>Repositories>Other Software and click on Add. In the apt-line, enter ppa:sevenmachines/flash and close it. Then Click on the Reload button. Now, search for flashplugin64-installer, mark it for installation and click on apply.

When done, restart firefox and flash should run fine.

Please share your flash player 10 experience in Linux.

GIMP 2.7.1 added Single Window Mode and GIMP 2.7.x can now be installed via PPA. It is available here for Jaunty, Karmic and Lucid. I have Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx installed and I installed GIMP 2.7.3 unstable. Here is how you can do it, but if you use it for production, you might want to wait for final stable release.

GIMP 2.7 in Ubuntu

Launch Synaptic Package Manager and click Settings>Repositories>Other Software and then Add

ppa:matthaeus123/mrw-gimp-svn

. Reload the software list and mark for upgrades. That will install GIMP 2.7 and you can enable the Single Window Mode by navigating to Window>Single Window Mode.

I was wondering if we could downgrade from Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Alpha to Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala. So I decided to put it upon test and I succeed. So, I am sharing this with those who wish to keep using stable Karmic Koala till the final version of Lucid is out.

Please note however, that all the installed applications will be lost, however the settings and files in your home directory will be preserved. So, for example if you have a huge list of saved sites on your Filezilla client, Filezilla will be gone, but when you install Filezilla on your Karmic, the settings should work. Also, your Firefox browsing history, preferences and other settings will also be preserved.

DISCLAIMER: Please use the information at your own risk. I do not take responsibility of whatever damages you do to your Ubuntu installation, data or anything else by using the information in this tutorial.

First, it is not a good idea to downgrade. If you are experiencing problems, you should try asking in ubuntuforums for help. You may wish to file a bug report too to help the developers fix it.

Prerequisites:
Make sure you have the Human Theme set as your current theme and not one of the light themes that comes by default on Alpha 3 or any. You may also use a theme that you have installed manually to ~/.themes (from Appearance Preferences>Install)
Backup critical data, just in case.
Make a list of applications that you currently use, in case you are forgetful

Procedure
I inserted the Karmic Koala CD-ROM into the drive and selected “Install Ubuntu”. Then, I just selected my country and region. Then when the partitioning slide comes up, I selected “Specify Partitions Manually (Advanced)”.

Image: Specify Partitions Manually

Then, I could see my parititon layout. I had installed Ubuntu in a single partition (with a separate swap partition though).

If you had selected a different physical partition for /home, you can simply choose to format the root (/) partition, and install Ubuntu over there. Even if that is the case, you should change the partition containing the /home directory to be mounted as /home so that it is not created in the same root partition. Also, select the same filesystem type you had (instead of “Do not use”). Also, if you wish to format, make sure you have backed up everything that has been saved to the root (/) partition. /var/www and MySQL databases are on the root partition, for example and not in the /home partition. Hence, these will be lost if you choose to format. There may be other files if you use other programs too, so make sure you know what you are doing.

If you had installed everything in the same partition i.e. no separate partition for /home or /etc or others, you should not mark the root partition for formatting as I have done. However, you must change it from “Do not use the partition” to the corresponding type you have used.

Image: Prepare Paritions 1

Image: Preparing Partition 2

Review your partitioning setup and make sure of the formatting options (checked or unchecked as explained above, but the safe bet is to leave for not formatting in either case).

Image: Preparing Partition 3

Now, this part is crucial. You must enter the same username that you previously used while installing (or any other user capable of using sudo or gksu i.e. in listed in the sudoers file may be used). You may choose to enter a different username and import user configuration later, but I haven’t tried how it works, so I recommend you to use the same. I even chose the same password, but any other password should work.

Image: Entering User Information

Now, you should see a “Migrate documents and settings” window that lists the users that are on the system. You should not choose to import any of them if you have entered the same username in the previous step. However, if you haven’t, you may choose to import settings. Again, as I have not tried this one, I cannot assure all other application settings will be restored.

Image: Import Application settings

Now, you can go ahead and continue the installation process.

If everything goes right, you must be able to boot into Karmic Koala and install the applications you were using with the same settings and data as in Lucid Lynx. It is highly recommended that you should upgrade to the latest packages using the update manager or Synaptic Package Manager.

Hope this helps.

Please do share your results.

I am using globalmenu 0.7.9 (Mac OS X like Global menu for Gnome) from the globalmenu-team PPA (Karmic as Lucid is not available now) in my Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx. I get the following error on terminal when I try to launch any gtk applications from the terminal:

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Gtk-Message: Failed to load module "gnomenu-panel": libgnomenu-panel.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Gtk-Message: Failed to load module "globalmenu-gnome": libglobalmenu-gnome.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

However, the gnomemenu-panel works fine, I wanted these messages to not appear.
I opened up /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/modules and found that the plugin had different files than listed in the error message. To fix the problem, I just created symbolic links to the existing files. This is how I did it from the terminal:

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cd /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/modules
sudo ln -s libglobalmenu-gnome-panel.so libglobalmenu-gnome.so
sudo ln -s libglobalmenu-gnome-panel.so libgnomenu-panel.so

and the messages are gone.

Hope this helps.

I am using balazan theme in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Alpha 4 from breathe ppa for Karmic Koala since Lucid PPA was not available when I started using Lucid. I saw this message when I launched gedit from terminal (gnome-terminal):

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/usr/share/themes/balanzan/gtk-2.0/gtkrc:89: Murrine configuration option "scrollbar_color" is no longer supported and will be ignored.
/usr/share/themes/balanzan/gtk-2.0/gtkrc:93: Murrine configuration option "gradients" is no longer supported and will be ignored.

Seems like the theme I’m using has some depreciated configuration options after Murrine update. I opened the /usr/share/themes/balanzan/gtk-2.0/gtkrc file (as root) using the following command from Alt+F2

gksu gedit /usr/share/themes/balanzan/gtk-2.0/gtkrc

and then removed the lines in question (89 and 93 in my case, those that contain depreciated options) and saved it. The messages are gone.
Hope this helps.

I am using Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Alpha on a system with Gigabyte GA-G31M-S2L with Intel GMA 3100 onboard graphics. I upgraded to Lucid from Karmic Koala (9.10) and it was always showing these errors on boot:
“error: mountall Could not Connect to Plymouth”
“mountall main process (x) terminated with status 1″
Also, I could not experience Plymouth. I thought it was a problem with Plymouth and believed updates will fix it, but that did not happen till date. Today, I decided to fix it and went looking around for a fix and got it working.

I found this thread on Ubuntu Forums and was able to fix it by following it.
I checked by boot options and noticed that there was only “quiet” specified, and no “splash”. I added “splash” and it worked.

For that, I just had to do the following:
(Please continue at your own risk)
Launched the terminal (Accessories > Terminal) and typed in sudo dpkg-reconfigure grub-pc. I left the linux command line field empty and hit enter.
In Linux default command line, there was “quiet” already. So I added “splash”(without quotes) after a space.

Then I pressed enter and again enter. I chose the default in Grub Install Devices and pressed enter again.
It gave me:

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Installation finished. No error reported.

and then generated grub.cfg.

Then, I typed in

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sudo plymouth-set-default-theme --list

and pressed enter. It gives a list of installed themes for plymouth. To set, you can use

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sudo plymouth-set-default-theme THEME_NAME --rebuild-initrd

where THEME_NAME is the one listed by the previous command. I chose solar by typing in:

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sudo plymouth-set-default-theme solar --rebuild-initrd

and rebooted. I could see plymouth now. The solar theme looks great.

Your graphics card may not be compatible with Plymouth, so don’t expect it to work, not so early. I hope it supports yours in later developments.

UPDATE March 29: When I upgraded my system, the kernel was updated to 2.6.32-16 and the same error started appearing again. It was working fine (and still does) with kernel 2.6.32-15. Hope they fix it in the next kernel build. I am getting this with Plymouth 0.8.1-1ubuntu1

UPDATE March 30: Kernel updated to 2.6.32-18 and Plymouth to 0.8.1-1ubuntu3 but the problem still persists. Please follow bug 551062 at Launchpad to find out when it is solved.

Please share your Plymouth experience.

Newmat is a matrix manipulation library for C++. It can be used with various C++ compilers.

Here we will go through how to use newmat with Code::Blocks in Ubuntu. I’m using Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala with newmat 10 and Code::Blocks 8.02, however other versions may also work. Here is how you can do it.

Install libnewmat10-dev from Synaptic.
Open Code::Blocks.
If you want to add newmat to all your projects without having to care about setting it up in later projects of yours, you can edit the settings from Settings > Compiler and Debugger menu. However, if you want to add to particular project only, you will need to reach for Project > Build Options.
Now, in the Linker tab, Add newmat. Now, you are ready to use newmat in your programs.

To use newmat, you will need to include newmat.h as follows at the beginning of your C++ project as follows:
#include

You may also want to include iomanip and newmatio.h for operations such as c< You can do that as follows:
#include
#include

Don’t forget to use the following before you write any code:
using namespace NEWMAT;

For more, view newmat documentation at http://www.robertnz.net/nm10.htm

Hope this helps.

Docky is a great dock for Linux and is based on Gnome-do.

Installation
If you haven’t already installed it, you can add the following repositories to your Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala or Lucid Lynx: “ppa:docky-core/ppa” in Synaptic Package Manager>Settings>Repositories then reload. Then you can simply install it from Synaptic.

Now, launch it (Alt+F2>docky or Accessories>Docky) and then right click settings to configure it. After you are done configuring it, you can simply add applications to it by dragging them from the menu and dropping it on the docky.

After you are done configuring it, you may also want the 3-D look it offers. To get the 3D look, you will need to launch gconf-editor (Alt+F2>gconf-editor) and then navigate to /apps/docky-2/Docky/Interface/DockPreferences/DockX where X=1, 2, 3… the number of your Dock. On the right hand pane, look for Position and make sure it is set to Bottom (this is the default). Now, check the checkbox next to ThreeDimensional. To view the changes, you will need to quit docky and start it again.

Hope this helped.

As you know, Linuxmint is based on Ubuntu. So I thought, it might be possible to take Ubuntu as a base and turn it to Linuxmint with available Linuxmint software. Thats what I did.

I used Ubuntu Karmic Koala and turned it into Linuxmint Helena. You might use other Ubuntu base and turn it to respective Linuxmint distro, but you may need to follow different (yet similar) steps. Here is how I did it.

Please note that I am not trying to create Linuxmint Helena installation disk from Karmic Koala installation disk. What I am doing is turning a Karmic Koala installation to Linuxmint Helena Installation. However, after this is done, you may use mintconstructor to create Live+Installer CD/DVD for Linuxmint.

Disclaimer: I am not responsible for any kind of loss (time, data, your pet penguin.. whatever) you might face due to the instructions in this tutorial. Please proceed at your own risk.

Installation of Ubuntu:
First of all, I installed Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala. If you are reading this and have reached so far, I’ll assume that you know how to install Ubuntu so I’m skipping the details. Just a standard Ubuntu Karmic Koala installation, nothing more nothing less. You may also use your existing Ubuntu Karmic Koala installation.

Addition of repositories:

Launch Synaptic and navigate to Settings>Repositories. In the other software tab, add the following lines one by one:

deb http://packages.linuxmint.com/ helena main upstream import backport
deb-src http://packages.linuxmint.com/ helena main upstream import backport #Added by software-properties
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ karmic main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ karmic-updates main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ karmic-security main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu/ karmic partner
deb http://packages.medibuntu.org/ karmic free non-free

Now, Reload the package list by clicking on Reload.

When reloading is complete, search for package mint-meta-main and mark it for installation. This will select most mint software. Also, search for xsplash and mark it for removal. Now apply the changes and wait.

When the installation is complete, reboot. After you are back, you should get a mint-like system with softwares, theme and boot screen of Linuxmint.

More:
You can add mint-menu to your panel by right clicking the panel>Add to Panel and select mintmenu. You can change the panel layout for it to look like Linuxmint.
You may also create Linuxmint installation disk with the mintconstructor wizard (you will need to install mintconstructor first).

Hope this was helpful.