WYMWTTLinux – #31 Gnome Commander
Posted by: liquidskinn on: July 11, 2009
Why You Might Want to Try Linux (WYMWTTLinux) is a series of posts around the same topic – Ubuntu Linux.
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Gnome Commander is a file manager, just like Nautilus – only, unlike Nautilus, Gnome Commander has two panes, which makes connecting to two different computers to transfer files between them possible with only one window open. You can also connect to servers running on Unix or quite possibly, to Windows servers via services. That said, I only realized just now that Gnome Commander is very much like Filezilla. 
To install Gnome Commander, go to Applications > Add/Remove and do a search for it there. Again, it’s not Canonical maintained, so the only way to get it is through here or downloading it off from the Internet.
After successful installation, run the application by going to Applications > Accessories > Gnome Commander. You’ll then see a very retro-looking two-paned file manager (Nautilus rocks in this category).
If you don’t like that color (most people don’t), just so you know, you can change that too. It’s under Settings > Options > Layout tab > Color scheme. Choose Custom from the drop down box if you want to choose your own color.
As you can see, you can connect to different locations in either of the two panes, enabling drag and drop between them. Normal file operations like cut, copy, paste and new folders are all there. Also, the location (see pic) is clickable, so you can click,for example, the Home word there and it will take you back to the Home folder.
Let’s move on to accessing remove servers. To create a new connection, you can either click the Remote Server icon in the toolbar, near the Help menu
OR you can go to Connections > New Connection (takes you to create a new connection) or Remote Server (takes you to the list of remote server connections but has a button to create a new one)
Choose the service type (supports SSH, FTP, Public FTP, Windows share, WebDav (HTTP), Secure WebDAV (HTTPS), then a custom location I have no idea what for), and supply all the other values.
Click OK to save the new connection.
To start connecting to that remote server, click the Remote Server button from the toolbar or go to Connections > Remote Server. Select from the list of connections then click Connect.
Now, here’s a cool feature. You have the option to send a file to somewhere straight from Gnome Commander. All you have to do is select a file from either of the two panes and then, either right click > Send File or click the Send File button from the toolbar (see pic)
A new dialog will open (see pic below) where you can specify where to send the file to. It supports sending to CD/DVD (pictured), Email (via Evolution), Instant Message (via Pidgin) and as Removable Disk and shares (dunno what this is for). Options relating to what’s selected will show up (list of contacts will be provided if you selected to send via Pidgin). Tried and tested and it works, although I have no idea how the fourth option works.
Also, should you wish to view a folder in Nautilus (coz, I dunno, mebbe you miss having big icosn and folders?), you can right click anywhere inside either of the pane, and click Open this folder (see pic) – the one that has the Nautilus icon.
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WYMWTTLinux – #30 Bulk Rename
Posted by: liquidskinn on: July 10, 2009
Why You Might Want to Try Linux (WYMWTTLinux) is a series of post around the same topic – Ubuntu Linux.
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Bulk Rename is a small application by Thunar (same guys who made Gnome Commander, the topic for tomorrow’s post) that can rename multiple files at once. It’s powerful because, you get to control much of how the files will be renamed.
Bulk Rename is not maintained by Canonical, so you won’t find it in the repository. It is, however, available from Add/Remove so install it from there.
After successful installation, go to Applications > Accessories > Bulk Rename to run the application.
You’ll then see a window that looks like this (see pic) – where you’ll see a big Add and Remove button, plus an About button.
To start batch renaming, click the big Add button (the icon might not look like that in your system – it depends on what you use as your icon theme). Browse around for the files you want to add to the list. Please note that ordering the files in the list is not possible. If you want them to be renamed in a particular order (let’s say you chose Numbering and the order must be well kept) you have to add them in the same order – one by one.
Once the list is ready, you can now play around with the settings on how the files will be renamed. The list displays the new name once the settings are applied so you can see what the outcome will be.
Once you’re done editing, click the Rename Files button and you’re all set.
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WYMWTTLinux – #29 Alltray
Posted by: liquidskinn on: July 9, 2009
Why You Might Want to Try Linux (WYMWTTLinux) is a series of post around the same topic – Ubuntu Linux.
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Alltray is a useful app that lets you “dock” ANY application into the system tray/notification area.
It’s not installed by default, so you have to install it from the repository, either by doing it from the command line (sudo apt-get install alltray) or from the Add/Remove… menu.
After successful installation, you can invoke it from Applications > Accessories > Alltray or you can add a custom launcher to your panel (command: alltray) so you can have easy access to it.
To test if it works, try opening a window (ANY window from ANY application). Click on your Alltray launcher to launch the app – you should see somehting like this:
Like what that says, click on the window you opened to dock it to your system tray. The icon representing the window will appear there. You can click on it to minimize and maximize the window. Should you wish to undock it (remove from the System Tray), simply right click on the icon and click Undock.
You can do the same for each of the application windows that you want to reside in the system tray instead of the taskbar (panel). This is really handy if you have windows of applications that you need to remain open forever, but don’t want to be visible all the time.
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WYMWTTLinux – #28 CheckGmail
Posted by: liquidskinn on: July 8, 2009
Why You Might Want to Try Linux is a series of posts around the same topic – Ubuntu Linux.
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This is not much of a big deal a tool but, worth the install if this is your thing.
CheckGmail is a small application that sits in your notification area/system tray, and displays a, yep, you guessed it, notification when your Gmail account receives new mail. It’s pretty straight forward and easy to use.
Very similar to Gmailnotifier(?), that tool that does the same thing but on Windows systems. What they don’t have in common is that, this one will let you change the notification icon, and also, you can delete the incoming message right away – straight from the notification app.
Right. CheckGmail is available from the repository, so you can go run a Terminal window now and type
sudo apt-get install checkgmail
Once done, you can start it by going to APplications > Internet > checkGmail. If you want this to start with Ubuntu, you can specify it in the Startup Applications (more of that in another post).
Right, on start, the Preferences window will show up to ask you for your login details – Gmail username and password.
In the same preferences window, you can set if it will check for labels (if you use them to filter your mail), and some other tweaks should you want to edit them.
The Gmail icon will sit along in your system tray with the other icons. It’ll highlight red when there are new mails, and is grayscale when there isn’t any.
When you do receive a new mail, CheckGmail will display popup notification, containing a preview of the mail, the subject title, who’s it from etc.
In that screenshot there, you can see that there are other possible actions – Open, mark as read, Archive, Report spam, and Delete – all in there.
If for example you read the preview and want to delete it right away, just simply click the Delete link there and boom! that’s it. It won’t open any more browser windows or stuff like that. That is totally awesome, in my opinion. Cool.
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WYMWTTLinux – #27 System Monitor
Posted by: liquidskinn on: July 7, 2009
Why You Might Want to Try Linux (WYMWTTLinux) is a series of posts around the same topic – Ubuntu Linux.
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System Monitor is Gnome’s version of Windows’ Task Manager.
Aside from being able to view currently running processes and applications, you also get to see some basic information regarding your system – what version of Ubuntu you’re running, what version of the Linux Kernel, Gnome and then some hardware specs:
Here’re the screencaps of what’s in the other tabs:
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GShutdown
Posted by: liquidskinn on: July 6, 2009
GShutdown is a tool that lets you shutdown/restart/log off automatically at a specified date and time. It comes in handy when you’re downloading something (torrents, anyone?) and can’t stay up all night waiting for it to finish just so you can shutdown the computer.
It has a simple enough to use interface, so there really isn’t much to talk about here – everything’s self explanatory. Here’re a few screenshots of the GUI. It’s available from the repositories too, so if you want to give it a try, do a sudo apt-get install gshutdown, wait for the installation to finish and you’re good to go. If all goes well, it’ll fall under Accessories.
the main window
Preferences - Actions tab
Preferences - Misc tab
WYMWTTLinux – #26 Disc Burning
Posted by: liquidskinn on: July 6, 2009
- In: Geeky| Ubuntu Linux
- 3 Comments
Why You Might Want to Try Linux (WYMWTTLinux) is a series of posts around the same topic – Ubuntu Linux.
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I need not explain what Brasero is since it’s obvious. It’s like Nero yes? Only far simpler.
A few weeks ago while I was still using WinXP, I burned a bunch of movies onto a DVD using CDBurnerXP, a freeware DVD burning tool. The movies are cartoons mostly, for my daughter to watch on our DVD player. After the burn process, I plugged it in only to eject it again, because for some reason, although the files are all in .avi format, they just won’t play.
Anyway, so Brasero is the Linux DVD burning tool. It’s already installed by default so no need to worry if you have it or not. You can run it from Applications > SOund and Video > Brasero Disc Burner. The main window looks like this:
From there on it’s pretty basic and easy to follow, so I won’t go over the details anymore.
If I’m not mistaken, Brasero is fully integrated with Nautilus, so when you place a blank DVD/CD in your drive, a Nautilus window opens where you can drag the files that you want to burn into the disc:
Once you’re done dragging files, you can click the Write to Disc button there to start the burning process.
Aside from a progress bar (see pic above) displaying progress, there’s also a cd icon in the notification area that also displays progress (parts of the disc will change color and become orange, much like a pie chart).
As for my story, I tried burning the same batch of videos onto a disc (same brand of disc I used last time). It worked without a fuss, and my daughter finally got to enjoy the cartoons.
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Installing Oracle 10g Express Edition on Ubuntu
Posted by: liquidskinn on: July 5, 2009
This article will go through installing the Oracle 10g Express Edition. Please note that Express Edition is different from the Standard and Enterprise because it has its limits – data size is only limited to 4GB, memory is only up to 1GB, and it will run in only one processor. This means that even if you have 2 or more processors, it will only run on one, and even if you have more than 1GB of memory, it will only run as if you only have 1GB. Aside from that, everything is pretty much the same (feature-wise), so this is only good if you’re a beginner and plan to use this only to educate yourself.
Also, this article is for installing the said version on Ubuntu, version 9.04, to be exact. I’ll be using the .deb package made available here, so I won’t mention anything about installing from repo (sudo apt-get…).
That said, download the .deb file from the link. The file is approximately 200MB and the filename is oracle-xe_10.2.0.1-1.0_i386.deb.
Once finished downloading, double click on it to install it. It’ll take a few minutes, and you won’t be asked for any configuration or whatsoever.
After successful installation, you’ll see a new menu item labeled Oracle Database 10g Express Edition with a bunch of other menu items. Don’t click them yet, and don’t get ahead of yourself. Even though you’ve successfully installed it doesn’t mean that it’s ready to go. You have to configure it first.
This won’t take long, don’t worry. Open a Terminal window and type
sudo /etc/init.d/oracle-xe configure
In there, you’ll be asked to provide the http port that will be used for Oracle Application Express, the port for the database listener, and the password for the user account SYS. Also, you’ll be asked whether you want Oracle XE to start on boot. Sorry, no screenshots, coz for some reason my brain forgot this little detail while I was ecstatic that I finally got it working.
From here, if all went well, you can now log on by going to the menu created earlier and clicking Go to Database Homepage.
It will open a browser window, whatever your default browser is, where that page will display. You can login by using the user account system, then typing the password you specified earlier in the configuration.
Speaking of browser, I had a little problem earlier, wherein even after successfully configuring it, the menus didn’t work, although I can still view the page by typing http://127.0.0.1:8080/apex in the address bar.
You see, the default browser in Ubuntu is Firefox 3.0. If you kept this even after installing the latest 3.5, you won’t have a problem running Oracle (viewing the webpage). In my case, I didn’t keep the previous Firefox installation when I installed 3.5, and I placed 3.5 in another location other than where it’s supposed to be (under /usr/bin). Since I uninstalled 3.0, there isn’t a default browser anymore.
To fix this, I simply edited the script files so that it points to where my Firefox 3.5 installation is. To do that, go to /usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/server/config/scripts using Nautilus. You’ll see a bunch of files with .sh extensions.
Some of those files are the ones being invoked by the menu items. So, the menu Go to Database Home page calls the file DatabaseHomePage.sh, so on and so forth. To know which one is being called by which, right click on your menu bar and click Edit Menus. Browse to the Oracle menus, select one, and click Properties to see where it points to.
Now, even though you found them already, you won’t be able to edit them because, according to Nautilus, you don’t own them (oracle does). For you to edit them, you have to open them as root (sudo, anyone?). You can do that by browsing to that location using a Nautilus run as root (read how to do that here). Once you’ve done that, double click on the file and click Display (not Run).
Now that the file’s open, edit the part where it says /usr/bin. What this script does is look for the files firefox mozilla and konqueror inside /usr/bin. In my case, it won’t find anything coz I have neither of those three in there. What I did is change the /usr/bin to wherever my Firefox is – so if it’s inside /home/user, you should replace /usr/bin with /home/user. Change both instances of the words in the file.
And I bet you anything it’ll work now.
WYMWTTLinux – #25 LSHW
Posted by: liquidskinn on: July 5, 2009
Why You Might Want to Try Linux (WYMWTTLinux) is a series of posts around the same topic – Ubuntu Linux.
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Sooner or later I will snap out of this fascination with the Terminal window.
Anyway, so lshw stands for List hardware. Lshw is a command/”small tool” that displays super complete information on the hardware specifications of your computer – and I do mean complete. Here’s what it looks like:
It’s purely command line but good news is, there’s a GUI version too. Bad news is, you have to install it first from the repository. To install the GUI version, open a terminal window and type
sudo apt-get install lshw-gtk
type the root password and wait for the installation to complete. To open the GUI lshw, type
sudo lshw -X
in a terminal window. Please note that you have to run it as super user, or else you’ll get incomplete information. The X should be capital X. Here’s what it looks like:
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WYMWTTLinux – #24 Man Page
Posted by: liquidskinn on: July 4, 2009
Why You Might Want to Try Linux (WYMWTTLinux) is a series of posts around the same topic – Ubuntu Linux.
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Men are only necessary to maintain balance. Oopss.. wait, before you react..please..that’s not what I’m going to write about here.
The man page is the three letter command for Manual Pager Utils. It’s the command-line counterpart of Help files and documentation – that helps users figure out how to use a specific feature.
to use it, open a Terminal Window and type
man appname
Where appname is the command that you want to see how to use. For example, if you want to see the man page for man, type man man (yep, that works, see pic).
You can use the scroll wheel of your mouse to scroll up and down, or you could use the arrow keys up and down. If you want to close the man page, simply press q (the letter q on your keyboard) and it’ll take you back to the terminal (well, technically, you’re still there).
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