My First Experience with UNR (Ubuntu Netbook Remix)
As yesterday’s release of Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx, I thought I would gave Ubuntu Netbook Remix 10.04 a try since I was going to reinstall Ubuntu on my netbook anyway. I downloaded UNR ISO image and created an USB installer through UNetBootIn. After I booted into the new Ubuntu live USB, I immediately clicked the installer to install onto the netbook. Surprisingly, the installer will minimize itself when installing after I entered required information. I found the windows selector at the top panel once I knew the installer is working. I clicked the installer icon to restore its window and found out that the interface is very compact compare to the desktop version of Ubuntu. The title bar for each window is near the windows selector.
After the installation was finished and rebooted, I first set up my GMail account through Evolution. The setup process was smooth without entering the details of IMAP gmail server. I then opened Firefox and installed Configuration Mania extension to change the way Firefox functions. The main reason I first installed this extension is because it helps me to configure the Firefox to select all when clicked on the address bar and to enable other useful features more easily. I noticed that Gwibber was not in the Favorite list. Because this app is one of the applications that I use most often, I added Gwibber into the Favorite easily from Internet list.
This is my first time use UNR. I usually had installed Ubuntu desktop edition onto my netbook. But because of this new version is the long term support release, I think that it’s more stable and more easier to use with the UNR LTS. In the end, I’ve already familiar with the UNR interface once I started to using it perhaps because I like its compact UI.
My Experience with upgrading from Ubuntu Karmic to Lucid
Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx was released today and I was very excited to try to upgrading from Karmic to Lucid through update-manager using the following command:
sudo update-manager -d
Fortunately, the download speed during the upgrading process was normal. The update-manager finished download the necessary files and start upgrading within 2 hours. However, the updates installation process is more time-consuming. I had to wait almost three hours in order to complete the upgrading process. After the upgrading was completed, I noticed that the Compiz Fusion effects were no longer working and my computer became slower than before the upgrade. I decided to download the ISO image and reinstalled Ubuntu Lucid.
I used this method to update my Ubuntu box before. I used on the netbook when it’s still in beta. The upgrade process was smooth. It took me almost as same time as this time. However, when I restarted the netbook, the boot process was broke possibly by upgrading to the latest version. This problem was solved also by downloading the beta version of Ubuntu Lucid at that time and reinstalled it onto the netbook.
Overall, you need to update Ubuntu by reinstalling rather than upgrading in order to have a clean OS. I used UNetBootIn which is available in the Karmic’s repository to create an USB installer disk to install Lucid rather than burn onto the CD. Through this way I installed the newest version of Ubuntu within half an hour compare to the 5-hour upgrade process. I recommend to reinstalling Ubuntu for each new release in order to enjoy the benefits of new features in each release. Just remember to backup your /home directory to an USB drive or external hard drive before the reinstallation.
My New Mini-blog (Updated)
(UPDATE 06/28/10) I’m closing down the mini-blog because it gives me a huge productivity lag by posting the same content onto that blog and Twitter/identica. Tumblr will automatically post the new articles to Twitter and Facebook, but not to identica. Please follow me on Twitter, Identica, and/or Facebook instead.
My new blog, mblog.robbychen.com, is a Tumblr powered blog. My goal of new blog is to post links, quotes, and videos I found around the web that are related to GNU/Linux and web development, as it corresponds to this blog. In fact, I created this Tumblr account long before this WordPress-based blog was created. At that time, I had no idea what to post to the blog since I didn’t have any specific topic. I remembered this account that I had been forgotten long ago when I stumbled across this article. It basically states that Tumblr could replace Twitter. I decided to reuse my Tumblr blog as a mini (alternative) blog to this blog. Because this mini blog is hosted directly at Tumblr, I had to change the DNS settings of mblog.robbychen.com to the specified Tumblr IP. I hope to have a backup feature on Tumblr to allow me to backup my blog content. The mini blog right now has only one post titled First Post. It describes the purpose of the blog. I will post new posts often when I come across interesting articles as well as on my Twitter and Identi.ca accounts.
My Open Policy Decistion
This morning when I read all of the GNU/Linux news from my email inbox delivered via Google Alerts, I decided to have my own open policy. Although my career is web development, I can contribute my server-side script code such as ColdFusion and PHP through Github and Google Code Project. Other server-side scripting languages such as Perl and Java is out of the topics of this blog because I’m only beginning to learn the basics of Perl and soon I will learn JSP as well as other languages, except Microsoft-owned ASP and ASP.NET. My hosting provider doesn’t support these two languages anyway. In fact, it also does not support ColdFusion. The reasons that I’m studying and using ColdFusion is that first because this language is required for my major. Second reason is that this language is identical to PHP. Thus it ‘s easier to learn this language together with PHP. In fact, the RPX demo page that I created is inspired by curl function in PHP.
In addition to open up more of my code, I have also decided to use, learn and contribue to other open source projects, including WordPress and PHP, as well as VLC and other projects whether they are related to the web or not.
One of my current goals is to wait and see if there is any good Android-based device in the near future that meet my requirements. Although I have a jailbreaked iPod Touch, I felt that it still is not very openness to me. My requirements of the device are following:
- Its price needs to blow $200 dollars
- It needs to have a camera
- It needs to have access to Android Market Place
- I definitely do not want the phone ability
- The GPS feature is in my wish list, but not really a requirement
I hope that there is going to be a suitable device for me before I begin to attend University of Maryland this Fall so I could experienment with some mobile programming knowledge.
Enable Line Wrap option in NetBeans Nightly
I always download NetBeans nightlies PHP pack since the beginning of April. However, I couldn’t download them during the last two weeks because of the huge workload that I had. I downloaded the latest NetBeans nightly 201004260200 and noticed that my useful line wrap feature is grayed out. I don’t know why is this feature disabled and since when. After I researched around the Internet, I found this bug report on the NetBeans website. According to one of the comments, the feature was disabled by default since April 13. Based on the bug report, to enable the line wrap feature, you need to edit the netbeans.conf file inside the /etc folder of the NetBeans installation directory, for example, mine is ~/netbeans-dev-201004260200/etc. Then add the line below inside the double quote of the netbeans_default_options variable:
-J-Dorg.netbeans.editor.linewrap=true
The whole line should now be
netbeans_default_options=”-J-client -J-Xss2m -J-Xms32m -J-XX:PermSize=32m -J-XX:MaxPermSize=200m -J-Dnetbeans.logger.console=true -J-ea -J-Dapple.laf.useScreenMenuBar=true -J-Dsun.java2d.noddraw=true -J-Dorg.netbeans.editor.linewrap=true”
After that, restart the NetBeans IDE and the line wrap feature should enabled by default and set to “Anywhere”. To verify, go to Tools -> Options -> Editor -> Format. You should see Line Wrap option enabled at the bottom .
The bug report stated that it will slow the performance of the application if this feature is enabled by default. In my experience, after enabled this feature by editing the above config file, it actually perform faster than before. I hope that the line wrap feature will be enabled by default in the final release of 6.9 on June 9 because I really like this feature.
You can download NetBeans nightlies at http://bits.netbeans.org/netbeans/trunk/nightly/.
Simple login form using existing Google or Yahoo account
I spent all of this morning write a demostration ColdFusion page for integrating with RPX API to allow users to use their existing Google or Yahoo accounts to sign in to my website. By using this API, I could get basic user information such as their names and gender. Actually, I only could get their names through their Google accounts, in addition to their gender if they signed in through their Yahoo accounts. I could get more of user information if I upgrade my RPX account. The ColdFusion page is a basic demo that shows a login link to the RPX login AJAX popup. Once the user logged in, he/she will see their names as well as some related information of their provider. In addition to Google and Yahoo, there is also an OpenID login option. Unfortunately, I cannot test OpenID because I don’t know how to implement my own OpenID since Google is also use OpenID implementation.
You can view the demostration page at the following URL:
http://160.253.0.40/Students/Students/0111/OpenIDapi.cfm
Here is the download URL for the source code of this page:
http://ca288-final-spring-2010-mc.googlecode.com/files/OpenIDapi.cfm
GNU/Linux Backup Solution
Here is a good overview of why you should backup your data in case of hard drive failure. I never backup my hard drive simply because I’m afraid of use up my precious hard drive space. However, I sometimes backup my /home directory to one of the external hard disk before I upgrade to newer version of Ubuntu. The reasons that this article listed out to backup hard drive data really motivate me to use a good backup solution for GNU/Linux.
Patent Absurdity, a Documentary Film created by FSF
The documentary film “Patent Absurdity: how software patents broke the system” was released by FSF on April 19th. It’s a film about how software patent affects the software developers and its community. According to the release announcement, the film is based on the series of interviews during the review of in re Bilski given by the US Supreme Court back in 2007. The film is almost 4 hours long. I downloaded the Ogg Theora HD version on its official website patentabsurdity.com and never watched it because of the lacks of free time. Perhaps I will watch it one month later after this semester ends 
Create a separate /home partition
This forum post is a very good step by step tutorial for how to make a separate /home partition. The advantage of create a separate /home partition explained by the post is that your personal data would not be lost when the GNU/Linux system becomes unbootable and you decided to reinstall the OS. I have used this method to install different GNU/Linux distros from time to time to preserve my personal data in the /home directory. In fact, I noticed the disadvantage of this method is that you need to manually delete the application setting folders which are hidden inside your /home/username folder after the reinstallation of the GNU/Linux system. Unless you want to reinstall these packages once again in your newly installed system, but probably you will change idea about reinstalling certain packages like me.
Ubuntu Sources List Generator
Ubuntu Sources List Generator provides many useful repositories that I didn’t know about, including AWN Testing repo and Firefox Daily Build repo. To generate Ubuntu-based sources list, just select your country and the Ubuntu release you are using. Then select the repos that you want and click the Generate List button. Follow the instructions on the next page to add the repositories that you selected. The only downside of the service is that it dooesn’t have NetBeans daily build repo. Although there is an Add Repository feature, I don’t know what’s the URL of NetBeans daily build repo. Overall, this service is great. It also includes the newest Ubuntu Lucid repos.