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.
Get Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope Now
So Ubuntu has released 9.04 as an RC and you’re waiting for launch day to get it. Bad idea. If you’re planning on upgrading to the latest and greatest Ubuntu 9.04. I recommend doing it now. When it’s officially launched, there’s no telling when you’ll be able to get your hands on it because of the server load. Here’s how.
Hit “Alt + F2″ and type “update-manager -d”
Want more? Sorry. That’s all I got.
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.
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.
Speak & Spell In Ubuntu?
Turns out Ubuntu has a seriously weird built in text-to-speech function available right in the terminal. It unfortunately sounds strikingly similar to Speak & Spell…just in case you weren’t around during the glory days of Speak & Spell (*ahem*), you seriously have to check this out first.
Now that you know why there is a generation of people who ‘can’t speak good’, I’m going to show you how to make Ubuntu talk.
- Open a terminal and type
espeak "Luke, I am your father" - Just make sure you type ‘espeak’ and then follow that with a string of text in quotes (don’t forget to wrap it in quotes)
More Options
Espeak can do some other really cool things including saving to a WAV file and speaking in different voices. Here’s how.
Save as a WAV file
- Enter:
espeak -w luke.wav "Luke, I am your father"
Monitor Your Laptops Power Consumption With Ubuntu
Found a really cool and very useful command today to monitor your Ubuntu laptop’s power consumption. Simply type the following command into your terminal.
gnome-power-statistics
If your hardware supports it, you should be presented with a screen that looks similar to the following
It’s interesting to play around with this to see how different things affect your laptops power. I turned the brightness down on my laptop from 100% to about 50% and the drop was dramatic. There are also different graphs you can view like charge history of your current session.
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.
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
Force External Drives To Mount To the Same Point
I recently rebooted my computer and normally I have my 2 internal drives and 2 external drives all mounted manually through the fstab file. If you don’t know how to do this, I wrote about mounting NTFS drives a while back. If you need help, just leave me a comment below.
Anyway, what happened was one of my external drives mounted, but to the wrong point. It is suppose to mount as /dev/sdg1 and instead mounted as /dev/sdh1. This probably isn’t a big problem for most people, but I have playlists that reference audio and video files from the external drive. Since Ubuntu mounted it to a different location, the playlist thinks the files don’t exist. The fix is fairly simple, here’s how to do it.
- Open a terminal window and type ’sudo fdisk -l’ to find the location of the drive
