Install Woopra 1.3 RC2 On Ubuntu 9.04
If you’re not familiar with Woopra, it’s an amazing real-time analytics system. I’ve been using them ever since I got lucky enough to get a beta invite at WordCamp last year. They’ just released the last Release Candidate for it before it goes Gold. Here’s how to install it on Ubuntu.
- Download the .sh file from the Woopra site (at the bottom) or here’s a direct link.
- Right click the file and choose ‘Properties’ and the click the ‘Permissions’ tab
- Check the box at the bottom that says "Allow Executing File As Program"
- Double click the file. When the dialogue box pops up, choose “Run in Terminal”
- A terminal window should open. If you see something about a “write protected file”, just hit “y”, then Enter
- You should now see the Woopra installer begin. I left everything as the default.
Unable to Lock Download Directory When Updating Ubtunu
Sometimes when you’re trying to either use the Update manager or sudo apt-get update in Ubuntu, it will throw an error saying it was ‘Unable to lock download directory’. More than likely another instance of apt-get is running in the background. Luckily this issue is easily fixed by typing this into a terminal:
sudo pkill apt
This will look for apt to see if any instances are running and kill them. Now you should be able to update as you would normally.
Using Pandora’s Windows Vista Gadget
I recently bought a new computer that is running Windows Vista. My Ubuntu computer is still my main machine, but when I need to do some serious design work, CS2 running in Wine just can’t compete with CS4 running natively on a quad-core machine with 8 Gigs of RAM.
I also love listening to Pandora. It gets turned on the second my computer boots, and turned off only when I’m away from my machine or going to leave for the day. I’ve used Pandora’s AIR app since the first day it came out (and before then I used another desktop app who’s name escapes me currently) and I absolutely love it. Even more so now that AIR has hit Linux with an official release that I can use on Ubuntu and has been rock solid so far.
While listening today, I saw that Pandora had an official gadget for Windows Vista so I thought I’d give it a shot.
Make Ubuntu Instantly More Useful
Because of it’s open source nature, some really useful but proprietary software is not included in a default Ubuntu install. Some of them include Java, Flash, Microsoft Fonts, DVD playback, etc. Luckily there’s a quick fix to install most of the things you’ll need to get up and running quickly.
Here’s how
- Go to ‘Applications’ –> ‘Add/Remove’
- Next you’ll see a drop down that says ‘Canonical-maintained applications’. Change this to ‘All available applications’
- Now type ‘Ubuntu restricted extras’ in the search box and check the result that says ‘Ubuntu restricted extras’
- Now just click ‘Apply’ in the lower right and let it download everything. When it’s installing, you’ll have to check the box that says you agree to the Java EULA, but other than that, everything will take care of itself.
Remove Tabs From Adobe Photoshop CS4
I’m just going to cut to the chase: The tabs in Photoshop SUCK. This is coming from the guy who wants tabs everywhere. In explorer/file browser, my browser, my text editor…can you imagine how easy the universe would be to navigate if all the planets were simply tabs? Want to go to Mars? Just CTRL + Tab over to it. Simple right?
With all of this love for tabs, I am completely dumbfounded by the use of tabs in Photoshop. I really tried to like it, but it’s just not intuitive and it’s mind blowing that this was made the default for such an amazing product. Here’s how to turn them off, and actually start getting some work done again.
Go to ‘Edit’ –> ‘Preferences’ –> ‘Interface’
Now uncheck the ‘Open Documents as Tabs’ option
Creating a One-Time Use Credit Card With PayPal
If you do a fair amount of shopping online, you’ve probably thought about what happens with your credit card information from time to time. Most of the time, it’s ‘conveniently’ stored for you so the next time you shop with Company X the transaction will go even smoother. This is a terrible idea. What happens when (not if, when) the site is compromised? What if the company is a fly-by night? What if you have a keylogger installed on your computer?
There are a ton of bad things that can happen when you submit personal information from your computer. This is why I love the one time use credit card option that PayPal offers. I’m going to show you how to set up the PayPal Firefox extension, and help you generate your first one-time use credit card!
VirtualBox VERR_VM_DRIVER_NOT_INSTALLED (rc=-1908) Error
I recently installed the updated kernel in Ubuntu 8.10. Everything seemed to go fine until I tried to open my Windows XP Virtual Machine inside of VirtualBox. I initially got an error that said ‘Failed to open a session for the virtual machine Windows XP’. This error was immediately followed by another error dialogue box with the error:
VERR_VM_DRIVER_NOT_INSTALLED (rc=-1908)
There’s two ways to fix this. I would try the first method first, and the second only it that didn’t work.
Method 1 – Simple Command
Simply open a terminal window and type ‘sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup‘. This will take a little bit of time, but once it’s done, you should be able to open your virtual machines like normal. If for some reason this doesn’t work, try the second method below.
Method 2 – Uninstall/Reinstall
Go to ‘System’ –> ‘Administration’ –> ‘Synaptic Package Manager’ and search for ‘virtualbox’. Uninstall whatever is installed. Once it’s removed, reinstall it.
How To Kill An Unresponsive Process In Ubuntu
While this doesn’t seem to happen near as much in Ubuntu as it does in Windows, sometimes an application or process just stops responding. Luckily, however, killing this process in Linux is much easier than in Windows. Here’s how to do it.
- Open a terminal window and type ‘xkill’
- Your cursor will turn into an ‘X’. Simply click on whatever application isn’t responding and it will stop immediately.
Tweak Out Your Ubuntu System
One of my favorite aspects of Linux has over other operating systems is it’s infinite ability to be tweaked. Sometimes however, you need some serious l33t hax0r skills to do this. Enter Ubuntu Tweak. This piece of software makes it dead simple to tweak just about anything you would want from a File Type Manager to managing your thumbnail settings. Let’s get tweaked! …that came out wrong.
Setting Up Repositories and Installing
You can simply download the .deb file and install it that way, but I prefer to setup repositories so it keeps Ubuntu Tweak updated along with all my other software. Here is a direct link to the .deb file if you still want to do it that way.
- Open a terminal and type: sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list
- At the bottom of your souces.list file, copy and paste these two lines of code:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/tualatrix/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/tualatrix/ubuntu intrepid main
Dead Simple File Sharing Between Any Operating System
Since my switch to Ubuntu, my biggest hurdle has consistently been file sharing between Ubuntu 8.10 and XP, Vista, Windows 7 or other Ubuntu machines. I’ve found many different ways to share files between Ubuntu computers, whether it be SSH, scp or actually setting up a shared folder, but nothing that was idiot proof. And God knows I need something idiot proof to make it work correctly.
If you haven’t heard of Dropbox or used Dropbox, the time is now to get on board. This thing is amazing and since it works on all major platforms (including excellent support for Ubuntu) it is by far the most dead simple to setup and use. I’m going to show you how to set it up using Ubuntu 8.10.
Download and Install Dropbox
- Download Dropbox (direct link to Linux version here)
- Double click on the file that you just downloaded
