Well we’re into day two on using Kubuntu full-time and I’m getting most of my personal show stoppers worked out.  I want to thank everyone that left comments here giving me some suggestions.  Here are my continued thoughts on using it, and what I’ve worked out.

Has it been a while since you used FTP from the command line? While there are decent GUI-based FTP clients (such as gFTP), you can automate operations with the command-line version and handle file transfers with no user interaction at all.

The non-free codecs distributed by Medibuntu now come to a single metapackage: non-free-codecs. The proper package matching the architecture will be installed (please see the Launchpad bug report below).

As I mentioned a few days ago I have considered trying to use KDE again. Well yesterday I did a fresh install of Kubuntu 7.10 beta. Here are some of my initial thoughts:

As we’ve shown before, Opera is an extremely customizable browser, but it does so much that it can be difficult to remember it all. Then again you would have to know what it does in order to remember it.

Once upon a time, people lived in caves and hunted animals with spears. Then, they recorded things from the TV onto small black cartridges filled with magnetic tape. Finally, in 1999, the Digital Video Recorder was born and civilization was discovered. I may have missed out some minor details, but that's the short version.

I’ve been playing around with Compiz-Fusion on my Macbook over the past week or so and realize it could make a good topic for a tutorial.  The problem is that it took me *zero* configuration to get it going.  While this is good and a great boost for Desktop users everywhere I don’t really have much to share with the wide-world on setting it up.

What I do have to share however are the key shortcuts and settings that I like to use.

The New York Times had a review of Ubuntu today, and it was generally pretty positive. I've been using it for most of the year now, and at this point, I've almost forgotten that I'm not using the same OS as everyone else because it works so well. Not only are all the parts of the OS really great - Gnome, Open Office, Firefox, Thunderbird, Gimp and all the little apps like gEdit and the file manager - but the integration of these apps and general organization in Ubuntu is awesome as well. I find myself more and more productive using it every day as I unlearn old habits and learn new ones.

In this howto/hack I provide instructions on how to create a real virtual Richard Stallman to use with the programs vrms and cowsay. vrms is a program that will scan your Ubuntu installation and tell you how many non-free packages you have installed. The hack provides an ASCII art image of RMS to use with cowsay to output your vrms results. And before you ask, yes it is totally pointless.

Ubuntu has been main player in Linux distro for a couple of years, and yet some might found it to be a little bit slow in a few aspects. Here i try to show some of guides that might give a boost to your Ubuntu systems. These tweaks will make your system faster and more responsive without a doubt. Read on to perform the tweaks and enjoy your faster system.

I finally had a few minutes to do a clean install of the Gutsy Beta last night and it is looking hella cool. I really like the new default desktop background. I like darker/deeper colors so the the new image really hits the spot for me. Staring at a monitor all day (essentially staring directly into light all day) can be hard enough, but the darker and richer colors are much easier on the eyes (for me anyway).

Whilst I have been using the beta there was no Compiz Manager GUI to configure any desktop effects. If the Compiz Manager isn’t installed by default simply open a terminal and install it:

A few months ago in PC Advisor, we ran a feature on buying the cheapest desktop PC possible. We considered the idea of specifying no operating system at all, believing that the truly cash-strapped consumer might be interested in saving a few pennies by sticking on an open source Linux operating system - such as is the case with the Dell Inspiron 530n Ubuntu.

One question I get all the time is “What package is that file in?” There’s a really easy way to find out yourself. It’s called apt-file and it can search for a file in any package (installed or not). It’s really easy to use:

Yesterday an article on Ubuntu Linux appeared on the front page of the New York Times‘ website. The article, “The Next Leap for Linux“, talks about the basics of Linux, Dell’s preinstalling, Ubuntu, and multimedia codecs.

Unlike Windows from Microsoft and OS X from Apple, Linux is not owned, updated or controlled by a single company. Thousands of developers around the world work on Linux, making improvements and issuing new versions several times a year. Because the core Linux software is open source, these developers have the right — some would say responsibility — to borrow from one another’s work, constantly looking for enhancements.

Skype 1.4 for Linux is officially out of Beta, and is available for download.

The two big WNITVs (What’s New In This Version) are call forwarding, and a “Birthday Alert” service that notifies you when anyone in your Contact list has a birthday.

There is a long and somewhat heated argument taking place in the Ubuntu forums over a post by Ian Jackson in the Ubuntu Developers mail list, which is a wrapup of a discussion held on the irc #ubuntu-devel channel. The post advocates a change in the Ubuntu security policy by making it more difficult for new users to install untrusted 3rd party software.

The Mythbuntu team is pleased to announce the Beta of Mythbuntu-7.10. Together with this release, we're opening the gates of our very own Mythbuntu forums at http://ubuntuforums.org/forumdisplay.php?f=301. Please feel free to discuss and seek help with Mythbuntu.

If you’re the only person who uses your Ubuntu-based PC and don’t want to sign in each time you turn on your computer, you can enable automatic login via the steps found in this brief tutorial.

Last month, just one week after IBM announced it would help with OpenOffice.org's development, the company released Lotus Symphony, an office suite based on OpenOffice.org code. I found a lot of slick features in Lotus Symphony, but I worry that Symphony could affect the OpenOffice.org community adversely.

In a previous post I briefly mentioned my experience of using the "Goodbye Microsoft" installer for Debian. Since then Aaron has kindly pointed me in the direction of Wubi:

Kino is a video editor that allows you to produce your own video masterpieces using only free and open source software. With it, you can capture and edit clips from your video camera, add titles, insert still images, create transitions between scenes, and output the result in a number of formats. Best of all, it's easy to learn to use. But don't rely on the version in your distro -- grab the 1.1.1 release from SourceForge.net and build it yourself.

By default Compiz in Ubuntu uses the GTK window decorator. You can adjust the transparency level of the GTK Window Decorator window titles by changing a value in the GNOME configuration editor. Note that this only works if you are using a compositing window manager such as Compiz.

According to the NY Times today, "to watch a movie, the Linux user must install necessary codecs, or decoders. One way to do that is to first download a program called Automatix from www.getautomatix.com.”  Apparently, he was not running the Gutsy beta.

If you are trying to run many linux machines at a time it can become difficult to keep them in sync. One solution that many use is to mirror the repository(s) to a local network to save on internet bandwidth. While this is a solution it does require a lot of setting up, uses a lot of valuable space, takes a lot of time for the initial download and requires you to store programs that your machines will probably never use.