This post is inspired by this thread. Special Thanks to “smartboyathome” at Ubuntu Forums.

A lot of Linux users especially the ones who are newly finding their feet and have become recent converts of Linux get far too enthusiastic about the joys and benefits they experience after they have converted to Linux. They get excited and try to convert as many people as possible to their favourite OS.

These people just get far too excited and end up trying to force people to Linux. They preach about Linux and keep on bashing Windows. They allege Windows users to be “Sheep” and refer to Microsoft as “M$” and Windows as “Window$” or “Winblows” or “Windoze”.

Unfortunately they do not realize that people dislike to be preached upon. Most people have spent their entire lives using Windows and they have gained productivity using that operating system. Make no mistake, they actually like Windows, and seeing that their current OS being bashed by some unknown strangers does not give a right impression about the new community.

People desist change and change in OS is honestly a big change. Linux is not by an means is a *replacement* to Microsoft Windows. It is only an alternative OS which is free and open source and has its own sets of advantages and disadvantages. Just because people resist changes does not make them “sheep”. Windows is itself a good OS in its own right and people have right to use Windows as much as they have right to use Linux or Mac OS X.

Unfortunately they do not realize that people do not realize that most people dislike to be preached upon and people in the Linux community tend to forget this part of human psyche, and keep on preaching endlessly about Linux which even I admit is an OS not without problems. As a result, people tend to get pissed off thinking Linux users are religious zealots which are on a world mission to force every person out there to their “beliefs”

The attempts to covert new users to Linux from Windows or Mac OS X in preaching never works. It is of my own experience. As the Original Poster suggested at that thread forcing an OS on someone will more longer than not result in them rejecting it and maybe also hating it.

Linux does not work for all. Maybe it works for you or me but not for everyone. Each one to its own. We are not supposed to force our OS on others. Of course we can try to convert few users, but there are other ways such as : Just Mentioning it.

We could show up glimpses of our favourite OS, especially Compiz and effects such as Rotating Cube, Expose, Scale, etc. Wherever we take our laptops to the cafe, school, college or office; we could just ordinary work. People do get curious and may ask questions what you are using and who knows they might like it. Keep the ISO image of the OS in your laptop and pen drives and also few disks so that you can distribute if you are so eager. Also we should inform people the benefits as well as pitfall of Linux. Especially we should mention the pitfalls, though in a tone that they do not back off immediately.

Personally when I was a new convert I tried to preach Linux to people but over time I have realised, it is useless. Now I keep calm. Though that does mean that I do not mildly make fun of my friends when they bring their Windows problems to me.

The biggest reason I still dual boot my Ubuntu with Windows XP is Gaming. In fact the Windows XP in my desktop is used for no purpose absolutely except occassionally playing games.

I know for the fact that WINE has the ability to play lots of games, (not to forget the native Linux games like Doom and Quake) and I’ve tried and succeeded too. In fact I was pleasantly surprised how well WINE managed to run those games it did manage to run. The performance difference was too minimal as compared to performace of gaming in Windows,

Unfortunately, not all games run in WINE. Few games run so well that they run as well as they do in Windows and maybe even better. Few games run exceptionall well with an occassional bug, while others are playable with noticeable problems but a lot of games do not run at all. Of course, the failure of these games to not to run in Linux using WINE is no fault of anyone but the game developers themshelves. Most game developers do not even bother with the *nix platform and do not even help the WINE developers. Even more depressing it gets when a game runs well in previous version of WINE but fails in the newer version.

However the successes of WINE with few games it managed to run and this thread brought a thought in my mind. What if the game developers take a leaf out of id software and develop their games for Linux? It will seriously enhance the experience of all the Linux users. And yes I mean *ALL* Linux users.

How? – you would ask. Most people are not gamers and most people get satisfied by silly games like Gnometris and like and games like GnuChess and like, Sure, but I will still not change my stance by this argument. Why so? I will come to his point later.

To most gamers it would not matter in which platform their games run on, to gamers it only matters the performance of their favourite games (FPS of FPS, I call it,(frames per second of first person shooters) pun intended). Now we all know that Linux kernel could be tweaked in any way you like and Linux distros could be as light weight as you wish using lighter desktop environments. Now due to adaptability and free nature of the Linux based operating systems, gamers could extract much needed raw performance from their games especially in custom distros over Windows.

Adding to this fact that most Linux distros come free, both in terms of cost and freedom, the gamers would save a lot of money and spend those bucks in acquiring superior hardware which they would have otherwise spent on purchasing license of Windows. Of course this may not be suited to all, since most people have Windows license or pirate Windows anyway.

It can be argued that since most games are based on DirectX, they will not run in Linux. Of course. This is obvious. However game deveopers can develop their games on OpenGL and most game developers develop games on OpenGL anyway when they design games for the Sony Playstation and thus a Linux port would not be that difficult.

Personally I feel game developers could afford to develop a game for Linux and skip for Windows. You will say – “WHAAT? Ignore the biggest platform?”. I would say even no body would be left out since Linux is free, and it would be only required to be installed and let’s admit it installing Ubuntu is very easy, especially under Wubi, even for a six-packed joe.

Now coming back to the point – How would it help *all* Linux users?

It will help. And the answer is through better hardware support. If even 40% of gamers switch to Linux in this scenario, this would prompt the Hardware Manufacturers to develop better hardware drivers for Linux, because they would no longer be able to ignore the market share. Adding to this fact that gamers are a big target of the Hardware Manufacturers (they purchase high end hardware), so Hardware Manufacturers will develop better drivers and who knows may open source them.

Now with better hardware most of our woes would be ironed out and it would be more fun to use the Linux distributions.

And with better Hardware for Linux, Sky is the limit.

When I say “sudo rm **” I do mean a specific command which is used to delete folders in a *nix system. If you have visited Ubuntu Forums in the recent months, you would have seen lots of signatures of many users and moderators to anyone to not to use this command unless you are certain what you are doing. Now this is exactly true.

However there’s a problem to those answering questions, Many time we need to tell users how to delete folders which have only acces to root and usually this rm command comes to mind.

However my advice to folks is that DO NOT tell users to use rm command ever. A better way for them is to instruct the user to launch nautilus or konqueror in root access.

sudo nautilus

sudo konqueror

And the chances of user destroying his system will reduce considerably.

I hope in the future the sudo rm ** command should always issue a warning about exactly what it is doing before committing it.

Ex:
$ sudo rm -** abc

This command will remove the directories abc and all the files and directories within it. Commit? (Y/N):

AND

$ sudo rm -** /

THIS WILL WIPE OUT THE ENTIRE SYSTEM AND YOU WONT BE ABLE TO RECOVER. Commit (Y/N):

In April Canonical released Ubuntu 8.04 LTS more popularly known as Hardy Heron. It was the eighth Ubuntu version to be released so far but more importantly it is an LTS release which means that it would be supported 3 years for the desktop and five years for the servers.

The word LTS or “Long Term Support” brings three things to my mind stability, stability and stability. This is because it means trust from the corporates, newbies and server market where Ubuntu so far languishes. The last LTS release Dapper Drake was a landmark release in many ways it was extremely stable, had lots of features, and was easy to use. Till this day I remember Dapper as the Linux version which shifted me to Linux. I still consider it as the release which brough Gold Standard to the Ubuntu Linux.

Now with such a history of remarkable success that Dapper had, Hardy falls far too short. Though Hardy ran fine in my PC to an extent that I could call it good and had great set of features but however I did not find it so much better than Gutsy than Dapper was than Breezy. Many people are having lots of problems with Hardy. In fact things that worked in Gutsy did not work in Hardy. In my case for instance Compiz does not work as I made it work in Gutsy.

Getting to my point, Hardy though a good distro is not great enough to be labelled as an LTS release. It has many enhancements and is a good upgrade option as a normal release however it does not set a gold standard as Dapper did. Developers have focused less on stability for Hardy than they should have and the result Hardy cannot be called as a rock stable release.

In my humble opinion, Hardy shouldn’t have been released as an LTS. The developers should have released Hardy as a standard release and should have tested, and debugged for six more months and should have released its next version as LTS. By that time the final version of Firefox 3 would have been out and so would have been Open Office 3. Numerous bugs which are present in Hardy would have been ironed out and it could have been a release which truly deserves to be called an LTS release. However as things stand now Hardy is the LTS release and we would have to wait for two years to see what Canonical would deliver in its next LTS release. For the time being the Ubuntu developers are releasing Hardy 8.04.1 in July and I hope it irons out several bugs and does make Hardy deserving to qualify as an LTS release.

And let us see what Intrepid has store for us.

CNR or Click and Run is a free one-click software delivery service designed to standardize the process and eliminate the complexity of finding, installing and managing Linux software for the most popular desktop Linux distributions according to the Linspire folks.

Though installation of software in Linux distributions like Ubuntu have never been easier, however installing paid applications, custom applications, and proprietary software is not so easy as it is not included in the standard repositories. Many proprietary system developers do provide easily installable .DEB like Google Desktop , however updating them is not as easy as through the repositories and the user has to either Add Custom Repositories or uninstall and reinstall the software. But CNR is just right in such situations.

Installing programs using CNR requires installation of the CNR client. The CNR client can be easily installing by heading to CNR website and download the installer of your distribution. CNR currently supports only Linspire, Freespire, Ubuntu, and Linux Mint. It will support Debian, SUSE and Fedora in the future.

I installed CNR for Ubuntu by downloading and installing .DEB installer. Installation was smooth and hassle free as in most .DEB installation. Then I had to Log Out and Log In again for changes to take place (I pressed Ctrl + Alt + Backspace).

CNR had put its shortcut in the System Tools Submenu and I launched it. It automatically syncronised with the CNR repositories and offered to update all the packages, and then the CNR Client showed itself.

CNR could be easily configured using this application but no such configuration was required.

Now I wanted to test CNR to install something. I launched the CNR installer client by clicking the Running Man in the notification box. It launched Firefox and showed a webpage where I could search, select, and install the application of my choice.

I thought I install bygfoot, a football management simulator (I know it is in the Ubuntu repository but I wanted to try something). I searched for bygfoot and installed it with ease using CNR.

As I said it was easy and cool. Now I could launch bygfoot using the Menus.

Bottom Line

CNR achieves what it strives to be, easy installation of programs, especially for newbies. What is great about CNR is that it integrates with the distro’s package manager and thus make making life much easier unlike other projects like Autopackage. However it is not as easy and great to use like Add/Remove in Ubuntu and is not as vast as the official Ubuntu repositories and many programs are not available but is not far behind. It is still in the beta-development phase so I expect more innovations in the future. And as I said before, it is great for purchasing and installing proprietary programs.

However most users of Ubuntu do not need CNR as such but it is good to have options as well.

Google, the world leaders for search engine also have their own Desktop Search Applications. Creditably Google have also made a native version of this famous desktop search for Linux and binaries for installing it in Ubuntu are easily available.

Google Desktop can be easily installed by download and using their .DEB installer. And installing it is just a double click affair. However a better way is by using CNR or Synaptic. You can follow this guide for setting up Google repository and using Synaptic/apt-get to install Google Desktop.

After installation you can launch it by going to Applications->Google Desktop->Google Desktop.

Google Desktop will index all your files and has the ability to search for keywords within the documents. Thus it is very useful for finding documents containing information you seek for.

Google Desktop sits in the notification bar and indexes all your documents. It also scans evolution for E-Mail and if you have a G-Mail account it works even better.

The default desktop search page is identical to Windows as expected and so is the Quick Search Box and the keyboard shortcut for launching the Quick Search is same as in Windows by default: Ctrl + Ctrl

You can see the screenshots below.

Preferences can be set by using an HTML page. You just have to right click on the Google Desktop icon in the notification bar and choose Preferences.

Bottom Line

Overall, Google Desktop is a good desktop search software. However unlike its Windows counterpart it lacks the sidebar which takes much of its appeal. It is well integrated in the desktop and did not slow down my PC on boot up either. But still Beagle feels better to use and it is open source as well and I would recommend Beagle over Google Desktop.

UPDATE: This is no longer required in Intrepid Ibex (8.10), since Intrepid uses PolicyKit to assign root access limited to scaling of CPU Frequency by default, so you don’t have to do this in Intrepid. The Intrepid method is WAY more secure and indeed better.

Energy Saving and Energy Efficiency are the key words in technology today. This applies to the field of personal computing as well and is not limited to laptops. Even desktops need to be energy efficient and save the much precious watts of electric current.

In Ubuntu by default the CPU frequency scaling monitors and throttles down the CPU when not in peak use. So far well and good. But many times especially in notebook computers we require to manually throttle down the clock speed of the CPU so as to save battery power. Even in desktop it can be useful sometimes.

But by default the CPU scaling monitor does not let users to manually select the clock speed for your processor. However by the following tip it will certainly let so.

Zoom in to the terminal. In terminal, Enter command:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure gnome-applets

And it will present you the following screen:

Choose OK and the following screen would present:

Select YES.

And then the screen would close.

Now you can select your processor clock speed.

It also consists of profile which your processor might use. For ex. Conservative will save power.

I tested this with an AMD Athlon64 X2 4400+ processor. I’m sure ot will work in an Intel based chip as well. But I would glad if you confirm this in the comments.

Few of us like to play standalone flash based games or some of us have to view flash based programs bundled either from some CD distributor or with a Magazine CD. Some of them run very well in vanilla installation of WINE but few of them need other Windows components and cannot run well under WINE in Linux.

However now running Flash based programs in Linux using WINE is a child’s play. You can play any flash based game or flash based interface in WINE by following the subsequent steps:

• Install WINE.
• Download ies4linux from this site and install ies4linux.
• Press Alt + F2 and type ~/.ies4linux/ie6 and press enter.
• At the same time press Alt+F2 and type ~/.wine
• Now copy all the contents from the former folder to latter folder. And when prompted for overwriting, choose Replace All.
• Now go to terminal and type:

wine <flash-program>.exe

You can also drag and drop the program from file manager to the terminal and precede it by wine command. In Ubuntu at least, you can run WINE Windows programs by double clicking it.

Your flash program should run now.

To get straight to Business, all Ubuntu or Kubuntu versions at least till Gutsy do not run in Live environment. So usually ATi users have had to use the Alternate CD to install Ubuntu in their rig. However it is indeed possible to use the Live CD to run Ubuntu on an ATi based machine, at least it worked on my ASUS M2A-VM with ATi Radeon Integrated graphics. The trick is only to assume that the live CD is just a normal installation which it is in a way and I considered only X to be broken. The solution was simple. When X.org crashes for several times and when the message appears that X will restart itself in 2 minutes.This is the time to act quickly. We have to enter the tty environment  by pressing Ctrl + Alt + F1; In the terminal we execute the command:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

After this choose your video card driver as “vesa” and generally accept the default terms and setting as you wish and then finish setting it up. Make sure you do this within the 2 minutes.

Now go back to GUI environment: Ctrl + Alt + F7 and do nothing after that. Wait for few minutes (at least 2 minutes) and the GUI will run by itself. Now you can use the live CD as you please
and you can install Ubuntu as well. You will not need to reconfigure X after installation. But for every live CD session, you need to repeat these steps, period.

Nothing is perfect. Nor is Ubuntu which has set of major as well as minor flaws which do to a certain extent give problem. Minors problems sometimes give us great headaches and sometimes we are too ashamed of asking for help for those problems. Here I have selected few such problems and laid their solutions.

(1) There are no Desktop Icons like My Computer, etc.!

When You have just installed Ubuntu the desktop is clean and have no icons except of various disk partitions and there are no nice little icons for Home, Computer, Trash etc. in the desktop. Well fret not there is a simple solution:

• Press Alt+F2 to get the “Run Application Dialog” and type gconf-editor
• Open apps, then scroll down to nautilus and then choose desktop.
• There are various check boxes for various icons and you can choose whatever in mind.

(2) X or GUI is not loading and fixed with command line!

When In command line type the following command:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

and there a text based wizard will launch and just make choices according to your configuration. To be on safe side when asked about Video Driver choose Vesa.

Then Restart the system, and install the proper drivers for your graphics chip. Even if you don’t you only would not be able to play 3D game and wont be able to have Desktop Effects.

(3) How do I install drivers for my nVidia/ATi card?

Go to System->Administration->Restricted Drivers Manager and choose your driver and voila, your (restricted) graphics driver would be installed.

In case you face problem especially in ATi Cards, you can use Envy to install drivers from nVidia/ATi website.

(4) Windows has overwritten my GRUB. How can I run Linux now?

The easiest but the most expensive (expensive in the sense that you have to burn a blank CD, duh!), you can burn a Super GRUB Disk

You can also use Ubuntu installation CD too:

In the live environment.

• Open a terminal window or switch to a tty (Crtl+Alt+F1).
• Type “grub”
• Type “root (hd0,6)”, or whatever your Hard Disk + boot partition numbers are.
• Type “setup (hd0)”, ot whatever your harddisk nr is.
• Quit grub by typing “quit”.
• Reboot.

However you could also use Windows 98 and Windows XP installer CD

• Get Windows 98 boot disk and in the DOS environment: FDISK /MBR
• In WinXP installer CD: Go to recovery console and type command: FIXBOOT

(5) Firefox cannot install flash.

Well indeed Firefox will not automatically install flash.

• Go to Applications->Add/Remove…
• Seach for “flash”.
• In the Show Tab, choose: All Available Applications
• Check Macromedia Flash Plugin (strange it should be Adobe Flash Plugin)
• And Apply Changes.
• Restart Firefox. Flash should work now.

(6) JAVA does not work!

Similar to the above problem, search Java in Add/Remove and install it.

I will add more to the list.