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.
My Issues With Ubuntu 8.10 After Four Months
I switched to Ubuntu about 4 months ago after my Windows XP system crashed and I had the choice of taking an entire weekend to reinstall, or finally make the jump. Overall I’ve been incredibly happy with Ubuntu. I mean how much can you really complain, it’s free right?
I just want to highlight some issues I’ve been having since the switch. I don’t want this post to be taken as a gripe session about Ubuntu, but to point out the flaws that average users are going to come across, and could ultimately hurt adoption. I think how few issues I’ve had and how minor they are actually speaks for how far GNU/Linux has come and more specifically, how far Ubuntu has come.
I also want to make clear that a lot of these problems aren’t necessarily Ubuntu’s fault, but these are things that people will expect to work normally, as they did in Windows.
Update ClamTK Virus Definitions
If you’ve decided to run antivirus software on your Ubuntu machine, it’s more than likely ClamAV aka ClamTK (the GUI frontend for ClamAV). I went to update the definitions just for the fun of it the other day and I got this…
Luckily this problem is easily remedied. Open a terminal and type…
sudo clamtk
You should now see a green ball next to the Update Signatures field, letting you know that you are currently running as root, and able to use this option.
That’s about it. However, this does raise an issue that I will be covering in much more depth in a later article: Why Linux Is Still a Hobbyists’ Operating System. Flame on.
Quick Samba Tip: Locations Of Samba Shares In Ubuntu
With the newer versions of Ubuntu (8.10 and I believe 8.04 for sure), you don’t need to directly modify the samba configuration file (smb.conf) quite as much as before. It’s still nice however to know where it’s at just in case.
It’s also good to note that when you use the GUI to create a share, these settings are stored in a different location than the smb.conf file. Here are the locations of these files.
smb.conf
Location: /etc/samba/smb.conf
Quick command to edit it: sudo gedit /etc/samba/smb.conf
Samba Usershares Created With GUI
Location: /var/lib/samba/usershares/SHARENAME
Quick command to edit it: sudo gedit /var/lib/samba/usershares/SHARENAME
Eg. sudo gedit /var/lib/samba/usershares/music
Can’t Delete File In Ubuntu
Sometimes you’ll notice that one of your files has a lock icon next to it. This usually means that for some reason, you are no longer the owner of the folder/file.
This can happen for a variety of reasons, but it’s fairly easy to correct, albeit a real nuisance sometimes. Here are a list of commands to take back ownership of just about any folder or file on Ubuntu.
Note about the examples and commands below:
- You can usually leave out GROUP as I did in my examples
- If you see a ‘\’ slash, it’s because my folder name had a space in it and this is needed to let Ubuntu know that there is a space in the file/folder name, not a new command.
An empty folder
Command: sudo chown USERNAME:GROUP /LOCATION/OF/FOLDER
Example: sudo chown randy /home/randy/Desktop/Delete\ Me
Using Screenlets to Monitor Your Computer and Bandwidth
I used to use Yahoo! Widgets on Windows to keep tabs on my computer. There are some widgets that I really miss. Mainly some of the monitoring functions, like CPU and RAM usage, hard drive space, etc. I also had a handy weather widget and a clock as well. Nothing major, but just some of the niceties that make your desktop, your desktop.
There are several widget platforms on Linux including gDesklets, Google Gadgets and Screenlets. After trying all three, I settled on Screenlets simply because it did what I needed to do. If you’re looking for the widest array of widgets, Google Gadgets is the way to go. But for this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to setup Screenlets and how I’m using it to monitor my computer and my bandwidth.
Installing Screenlets
- Nothing new here. Just go to ‘Add/Remove’ under ‘Applications’ and search for quot;screenlets"
Installing Sun Microsystems VirtualBox On Ubuntu 8.10 With USB and Audio Support
So after I switched over to Ubuntu, there were still some things that I absolutely had to have Windows for. Primarily Photoshop (I do run CS2 inside Crossover, but I much prefer CS4), Dreamweaver and until Songbird learns how to not suck at podcast management, iTunes (that one just feels dirty everytime I type it).
Today I’m going to show you how to install Sun xVM VirtualBox on Ubuntu 8.10. I’m using Sun’s version as opposed to the 100% open source version, simply because it has some proprietary support for USB. I’m also not sure how much weight this holds any more, as I’ve not used the open source version for quite some time.
What We’ll End Up With
- Install Sun xVM VirtualBox on Ubuntu 8.10
- Install Windows XP inside VirtualBox (you can choose to install just about any OS you would like however)
- Enable USB Support
Mount NTFS Formatted Harddrives In Ubuntu
Even though Ubuntu is pretty good about automatically mounting any new external or internal hard drives, I think one of the things all Linux users should have a little bit of knowledge of is the fstab file. fstab is a config file that contains information about all the partitions & storage devices in your computer. It’s located at /etc/fstab.
Why is this important? It’s nice to be able to mount your drives to wherever you want on your computer, and make sure it mounts to the same place every time you boot. I recently added another external drive to my computer that was from an old Windows computer obviously formatted as NTFS. I had three options: 1) let the drive auto mount 2) reformat the drive as ext3 so Linux could read it natively 3) add a mount point in my fstab file. I chose option 3. Here’s how to do it.
Ubuntu Audio Preview Feature
I was messing around in Ubuntu 8.10 today and stumbled across a really cool audio preview feature. I’m not sure how long this has been a part of Ubuntu, but it’s already very useful and has a lot more potential. Check out the video after the jump.
One of the things I would like to see is some type of scrubber that pops up after you hover your mouse over it so you can scrub to a specific point in the audio. I’d also like to see maybe a checkbox popup in the scrubber window that keeps the popup open so I don’t even need to actually open the audio file. I made a rough mock-up of what I’m thinking of.
I seriously love this feature, and I hope they don’t stop with what they have. Just some thoughts for taking it to the next level.
Missing Add/Remove Programs List In Ubuntu
I normally use Synaptic Package Manager or the command line to install/remove programs in Ubuntu. Sometimes, however, I like to just look through the list with the descriptions and see how the programs are rated to make a decision on what to install.
Today I opened Add/Remove to find this…
Synaptic still works fine, but Add/Remove doesn’t show any programs whatsoever. After searching around the Ubuntu forums, I was directed to the fix. Simply type this line into the terminal
sudo apt-get install --reinstall app-install-data app-install-data-commercial
After this ran, everything worked perfectly. I talked to one person on the forums to see if he knew why this happens, but no one seems to know…Just one of the joys of technology I guess.
