Some of these minor changes are, better Ubuntu One integrations/sycing, Shotwell replaces F-Spot, the installer now gives you the option to install the mp3 codec (this is my favourite feature) and overall they did some more polishing on the desktop user interface (the menus look great).

You can download it here, however I'd recommend getting the torrent version because you'll probably get better speeds, here.

Note: If you don't have an Ubuntu One account already sign up here it's free.

Step 1
Launch Tomboy and open the Preferences under the Edit menu.

Step 2
Navigate to the Synchronisation tab and change the Service to "Tomboy Web" and the server will automatically be set to https://one.ubuntu.com/notes/.

Step 3
Now click Connect to Server, this will launch your web browser and you'll be prompted to log into your Ubuntu One account, do so.

Step 4
Once you've logged in with your Ubuntu One details, you'll be asked to "confirm computer access". What this is basically doing is linking your computer to your Ubuntu One account to sync your notes. Give the computer a name and click "add this computer"

Step 5
You'll be shown the following message:
"Tomboy Web Authorization Successful"..."Please return to the Tomboy Preferences window and press Save to start synchronizing."

Click Save back on the tomboy client and it will start syncing your notes up to the cloud.

Note: You don't need Ubuntu One installed to use the syncing, hence this process works cross-platform.

If you want more details on using Ubuntu Ones web interface for managing your notes, go here.

If you found this helpful please leave a comment and subscribe.

Step 1
Go to www.dropbox.com/downloading and download the appropriate .deb file.

Note: If you don't have a dropbox account sign-up for one here

Note: If you're not sure which one to download, you'll notice just above the download links they recommend which one you should download.

Step 2
Once downloaded, locate the file and double click it. You'll be presented with a package installer, just follow the on screen prompts.

Step 3
Another window will pop up, again just follow the prompts. This will restart nautilus for you.

Step 4
Go to Applications->Internet->Dropbox from your menu. This will start the final stage of this installation, click OK, wait for it to download and install the daemon.

Step 5
All you've got to do now is to put in your Dropbox account details (assuming you have an account) and follow the rest of the prompts and you're done.

Enjoy stupidly easy file syncing, cross-platform!

If you found this helpful please leave a comment and subscribe.

Note: Due to a recent update, you can now install Skype via the Ubuntu Software Centre, just do a search for it. You can also install it via the command line with the following: sudo apt-get install skype

Step 1
Go to www.skype.com/download and get the appropriate 8.10+ version for you (32/64-bit).

Step 2
Launch the Skype install .deb file (just double click it) and follow the on screen prompts.

Note: If you have a dependency error or the installer fails, install a missing dependency using the following: sudo apt-get install libqt4-dbus
Step 3
Launch Skype from Applications->Internet menu and press either Ctrl+O or press the Skype symbol at the bottom of the window to open the options menu.

In the menu you'll see a option to Choose style: change that too "Desktop Settings or GTK+". Then apply the changes and next time you open Skype it'll be using you native theme.

Note: I'd advise doing a Test Call to make sure everything is working okay. I found that sometimes Ubuntu by default mutes your mic so if you go into your sound preferences under System->Preferences->Sound and then go to te Input tab you should make sure that the mute box in unchecked.

If you found this helpful please leave a comment and subscribe.

What changes would you like to see in Beta 2 if it's not already been changed in this release? (I'm sure a lot of people are going to say, "buttons")

I'd like to see Rythmbox get support for Audiobooks and have better Podcast functionality. If they fixed that and then in 10.10 added a Podcast directory which you could browse and subscribe to Podcasts (like Miro), it would complement the UbuntuOne Music Store perfectly.

I would also like to see ATI get their arse in gear and support the new X version, but I'd be surprised if that'll happen before 10.04 is released. However that isn't really in the Ubuntu developers hands, the current workaround is to use the open source driver -ati driver.

Please leave a comment bellow and tell me what you'd like to see in Beta 2? or 10.10?

Step 1

Go to "Applications"->"Wine"->"Wine Configure" and go to the "Audio" tab, it takes a moment to load up. The settings that I found worked well for me was as follows:

Uncheck "ALSA Driver" box
Check "EsounD Driver" box

Hit Apply, OK and then "Test Sound" and if you can hear the sound clearly try running Spotify again and see if that fixes your sound problems, worked great for me haven't had any problems since.

Note: If that didn't work for you can try the Spotify suggested configuration here.

If you found this helpful please leave a comment and subscribe.

Note: If you don't have Adobe Air installed please follow this guide first and then return to here.

Step 1
Go to tweetdeck.com and click the yellow download button.

Step 2
It'll take a second to prompt you to install click yes and it'll then take a few more seconds to open up an Adobe Air window asking you if you'd like to install this application. Press Install, Continue and then Agree.

Step 3
The application should open automatically after it's finished installing and you can just type in your Twitter, Facebook etc...

It's optional to sign up for a TweetDeck account, but I hope you enjoy this great application! You'll also notice that you have a TweetDeck launcher on your desktop (which you can remove if you like) and it's also under the Applications->Accessories menu.

If you found this helpful please leave a comment and subscribe.

Step 1
Download adobe air here and save it to somewhere you can find it like the /Downloads folder.

Step 2
Open up a Terminal window under the Applications->Accessories menu and navigate to the folder you download adobe air to, in my case it was the /Downloads folder:

cd Downloads

Note: You can use the TAB button on your keyboard to auto-complete commands and file name, saves you having to type everything.

Then run:

ls

This will show you a list of all the files or folders in the current directory, you should see the AdobeAIRInstaller.bin file.

Step 3
Run the following command to make the file an executable:

chmod +x AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

Step 4
Now it's time to install it, just run:

sudo ./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

Step 5
You'll be prompted with an Adobe Air window asking you to agree the there ToS do so and it show take a few seconds to install.

Congratulations! You can down install Adobe Air applications directly from your web browsers or just by double clicking .air files you've downloaded. You should also notice that you now have two new entries in your Applications->Accessories menu; Adobe Air Application Installer and Uninstaller.

If you found this helpful please leave a comment and subscribe.

Firefox 3.6 has just come out and for people that don't want to wait for Canonical to officially upgrade the default Firefox 3.5 install on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala follow these steps:

Step 1

Go to System->Administration->Software Sources and in the Software Source window navigate to the Other Sources tab.

Step 2

Click the Add button and copy and paste the either ppa into the dialogue box:

ppa:mozillateam/firefox-stable (recommended)
OR
ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa

Then click Add Source and then Close it'll update your sources list.

Step 3

Open up a Terminal window under Applications->Accessories->Terminal, then run the following command:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install firefox-3.6 && sudo apt-get upgrade

It'll take a moment to download and install.

Once it's done you should now find when you run firefox it might prompt you with a dialog box asking to import your settings, procced as you like.

Note: If you installed the daily build ppa you'll see a new icon under Applications->Internet in your menu. Click the program called Namoroka Web Browser and there you have it, firefox 3.6!

If you found this helpful please leave a comment and subscribe.

[via webupd8.org]

Basically a symbolic link will allow a folder to be in two places at once. In my case I'd like to make a symbolic link of my /Documents folder and place it in my /Dropbox folder so it will be synced to my other machines.

Step 1

Open a Terminal and simply run the following command:

ln -s ~/Documents ~/Dropbox

It's that simple! There are many different ways you can use symbolic links, this is just one way I'm using it. Leave a comment below if you're trying/using them in a different way.

Note: The ~ represents the current users home directory.
Note: To remove the symbolic link just delete it the say way you'd delete a normal folder, so in this case you'd just delete the folder in ~/Dropbox/Documents. Don't worry I wont do anything do the actual ~/Documents folder.

If you found this helpful please leave a comment and subscribe.

Step 1

Download the source files from here www.getdropbox.com/downloading and unzip it (right click and "Extract Here").

Note: If you don't have a dropbox account sign-up for one here

Step 2

We now need to install the dependencies in order to build our install files from source.
Open up your Terminal and type:

sudo apt-get install libnautilus-extension-dev libnotify-dev python-docutils

Follow the prompts and it should a a few minutes to download and install everything.

Step 3

Navigate to where you created your /nautilus-dropbox folder (it'll probably have a version number after it) in the Terminal, in my case:

cd /Downloads/nautilus-dropbox-0.6.1/

Step 4

Once inside type the following commands into your Terminal:

./configure
make
sudo make install


Run each command one after another, they'll run for just a couple of seconds each.

Step 5

After installing it simply log out and log back into your system, navigate to Applications → Internet → Dropbox, click “OK” and it'll download and install the daemon and then prompt you for your Dropbox details.

As you can see it's a pretty easy install and it's been working great for me!

If you have any questions, comments or tips, please leave a comment below.

Note: I originally posted this guide for the Karmic beta, but seeing as it's release and dropbox have a .deb installer it'll have more use under this post.

Step 1

Download flash here (Source).

Note: Download it to somewhere easy to access it like your Desktop

Step 2

Navigate to the download and right click on it and Extract Here.

Step 3

A new folder will be created called /install_flash_player_10_linux open this folder and right click on the file called flashplayer-installer click Properties and naviage to the Permission tab and make sure Allow Executing file as program is checked.

Step 4

Now double click the file flashplayer-installer and then click Run in Terminal.

Note: You're going to need to close you web browser inorder to install flash properly do read ahead before installing, it's pretty easy though.

Step 5

You'll now be prompted with a terminal window asking to you press Enter on your keyboard to continue, do so.

It'll then ask you if you want to proceed with the installation, enter the letter y and hit enter.

You will then be asked you want to do another installation, enter the letter n and hit enter.

Flash 10.1 should now be installed fully!

If you liked this howto please leave a comment and subscibe.

Step 1
Open up your Terminal under Application->Accessories menu and run the following command:

gksudo nautilus /usr/share/applications

This will basically open up your file manager as root so you can edit the Home Folder executable.

Step 2
Scroll down the list until you find the Home Folder icon and name. Right click on it and go to Properties and under Command change the line to the following:

nautilus --no-desktop --browser . <-- Note: Fullstop not a typo!

Note: After the word browser there is a space and then a fullstop, this is deliberate, make sure you do this!

Simple click close and exit the file manager, Terminal and now if you use Gnome Do to open up your home folder it should work!

Note: You may need to logout and log back in in order for this to take affect.

If you liked this guide please leave a comment and subscribe.

Note: This tutorial is for Ubuntu 9.10 if you're using an older version of Ubuntu and thus GRUB see my previous artical - Howto: Speed Up Grub Boot Loader Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope.

Step 1
Open a Terminal window and run:
sudo gedit /etc/default/grub

Step 2
Edit the GRUB_TIMEOUT variable to something like 3 which will give you enough time to access other OS's when needed, but isn't a painful to wait on when booting normal.

If you don't have multiple OS's then feel free to make it 0, if you need to access the GRUB2 menu you just have to be quick to press ESC.

Step 3
After you've changed the variable, save the document, then go to your terminal the run the command:
sudo update-grub

This will generate your new grub.cfg file located in /boot/grub/grub.cfg

If all went well your GRUB2 timeout will be whatever you set it to next time you boot.

If you liked or found this helpful please leave a comment and subscribe.

I happen to be victim to both of these currently, the way I got around video tearing was by changing my video output as I outlined in my previous tutorial, Howto:Fix ATI Video Playback. As for the performance issues I've finally found the answer! It turns out that it's got something to do with backfill we don't need to know what it is or what it does, all you need to know is getting rid of it fixes performance issues such as slow maximizing windows and also should fix video tearing!

Caution: I'd like to warn you in advance that doing anything with xserver could make your system unstable and crash you desktop interface. So do this at your own risk!

Step 1

Go to System->Administration->Software Sources, navigate to the Other Software tab and click Add... and paste in this text:

ppa:launchpad-weyland/xserver-nobackfill

Click Add Source and then Close and it will update your package list.

Note: This is a Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala tutorial if you are using older version add the appropriate source from here

Step 2

Now go to System->Administration->Update Manager and you should see two new updates for xserver-common and xserver-xorg-core if not Check for updates. Then install said updates.

Once done give your PC a quick restart and you should see it has now fixed your problem.

Note: You can also do this from the Terminal by running:

sudo apt-get update && upgrade

If you found this article helpful please leave a comment and subscribe.

Google Chrome OS is an open source operating system for people who spend most of their time on the web built around the core tenets of speed, simplicity and security. http://www.chromium.org

During the Q&A I found that people really didn't understand what ChromOS is and the differences between it and the Chrome Browser. Firstly everything on the system is a web application so you should be able to use the web application from any browser. People just need to think of it as an OS that is just the browser. This means you never install applications, everything is stored remotely and nowadays that's fine seeing as we spend most of our time in a browser connected to the internet.

I'm glad Google behind the rather bold move to really push the envelope of what web applications can do and open new doors for creativity. I do see how this will help them though, but Google are a business and they want to make money, but this is still great news for the opensource community.

I personally would love an eclipse web application as I use that as my primary IDE for programming and if it could automatically save my code in the cloud that would be great! I see there being some problems with the OS like storing music collection and syncing them with a device. Am I going to have to download my whole music library from the internet every time I get a new mp3 player? What about uploading my music library online? Is that going to cause problems with piracy and such? Bandwidth cap? That's just one item that really jumped out at me that had a lot of questions around it.

Overall I'm excited about this new OS and I will test it out and probably do a tutorial on how to build the code yourself over Christmas break, but for as mentioned in the video they don't really see it as being your primary OS so I'll be sticking with the more conventional OS model for now.

Please post a comment on what you think about the OS?, where you'd like to see it go? and whatever else you have on your mind.

When I opened up alsamixer pressed tab until I was viewing [All] I saw that there were two options both called analog and I figure well everything else seems to be on why no see what they do, anyway, I ended up pressing up once to change them both to Digital and that seemed to fix my problem instantly!

A little secondary tip would be to have the Sound Preferences application focused on input and try and make the little bar move when you make a sound. Then test it out with the Sound Recorder application under Applications -> Sound & Video

Hope this helps someone else out!

If this was helpful, please comment and subscribe.

I'm not really sure why it's can't resolve the host, but the easiest way to fix this little problem is to simple uninstall the ttf-mscorefonts-installer, but now you're thinking well maybe I want the Microsoft fonts for cross-platform compatibility reason, well I've got my own little script that does that for you too.

Step 1

Open up your Terminal under Applications -> Accessories ->Terminal and run:

sudo apt-get remove ttf-mscorefonts-installer

Step 2

Download my script here (you'll have to unzip it to get to the bash script), by default it's not an executable, which we will amend in a second. In order to run my script open a Terminal and navigate to the directory the file is in (i recommend putting it on the Desktop) as shown in my example:

cd ~/Desktop/

Now run the following command to make the file executable:

sudo chmod +x msfonts

Note: You may need to install cabextract, as it's one of the programs I use in my script. In your Terminal run:

sudo apt-get install cabextract

Step 3

In the same terminal windows run the script:
./msfonts

Note: My script is pretty basic as you can see and may take sometimes to download all the files depending on your connection. It basically get's the .exe's that hold the fonts extracts, renames and copies the fonts into the appropriate directory on your system, which is /usr/share/fonts/truetype/mscorefonts/ and now you can see the fonts when you open up Open Office Writer.

Let's hope the package managers notice this problem soon, because I have no doubt in my mind that is is going to really annoy a lot of people!

Note: My fix works most of the time, but I've got a few emails saying it didn't so I've directed them to follow this post

If you liked this guide please comment and subscribe.

Edit: Made a quick correction in Step 2 making the file an executable, thanks FXB for pointing that out.
Edit: Made a note in Step 3 to make sure you have cabextract, otherwise my script wont work.
Edit: Just so people know you can read/do what my script actually does manually...Basically go download the .exe extract the font, rename it and then move it too the correct place. It's that simple.

Step 1

Go to www.getdropbox.com/downloading and download the appropriate package for your system.

Note: If you don't have a dropbox account sign-up for one here

Step 2

Run the .deb file and follow the install instructions, it'll just take a moment.

Step 3

It'll tell you to logout and log back in, do so. Now run the application from Applications->Internet->Dropbox. It'll take a moment to load up then give you a warning that it's going to download/install a nautilus daemon, allow it to do so. This will just take a minute or so.

Step 4

You'll soon be greeted with a window that'll ask you if you'd like to login or create an account do what's appropriate for you.

Step 5

Once you've gone through the setup stage your Dropbox folder will now be located in your /home directory. You can however pick where you'd like to locate it and you can see that option in the setup, but the default is fine.

Step 6

Simple drag and drop files in and out of the folder and they will sync with the cloud and other machines you have it running on (can be Windows/Mac/Linux)

Congratulates you're all done! The thing I like the most about Dropbox is the fact that it's so easy to use, cross-platform and most of all free!

If you liked this guide or would like to add to it, please post a comment below and don't forget to subscribe (it's free)

Step 1

Go to www.skype.com/download and get the appropriate 8.10+ version for you (32/64-bit).

Step 2

Launch the Skype install .deb file (just double click it) and follow the on screen prompts.

Note: If you have a dependency error or the installer fails, install a missing dependency using the following: sudo apt-get install libqt4-dbus

Step 3

Launch Skype from Applications->Internet menu and press either Ctrl+O or press the Skype symbol at the bottom of the window to open the options menu.

In the menu you'll see a option to Choose style: change that too "Desktop Settings or GTK+. Then apply the changes and next time you open Skype it'll be using you native theme.

Step 4 (Optional)

If you'd like to have Skype startup automatically when your system starts, go to "System -> Preferences -> Startup Application", Click "Add" and enter the following details:

• Name: Skype
• Command: skype

Click "Save" and you're done! Next time you load up your system Skype will auto-launch.

Note: I only tired this on the 32-bit version of Karmic, but I'm sure if you use the correct .deb it should install fine for you.

Edit: If you're having problems with getting your mic to work check out this post: Quick Tip: Getting Your Mic Working with alsamixer

Please comment if you found this helpful or would like to make a suggestion.