Fresh Ubuntu

This week I took printing to another level! Well...ok, maybe not another level, more like a side level. Oh alright, its not a whole level, its more like a side step. Whatever it is I thought it was useful. I setup a PDF printer on my Ubuntu laptop without using Adobe Acrobat and I let you in on the whole thing on my podcast. You can download the episode below:

Freshubuntu Episode 13


But first the news items:

1. Possible Artwork reversal On Edgy

2. Portland project

Installing Cups-pdf printer method #1

a. Install cups-pdf by running sudo apt-get install cups-pdf
b. Edit the configuration file by running sudo gedit /etc/cups/cupsd.conf
c. Change "RunAsUser Yes" to "RunAsUser No"
d. restart cups by running sudo /etc/init.d/cupsys restart
e. Goto the menu System>>Administration>>Printing and add a printer
f. Select the detected printer "PDF Printer"
g. Select the Generic, Postscript Color Printer (Rev 3b)
h. Give it a name, like PDF Printer
i. Right click on the newly created printer, and select Properties
j. Click "Print a Test Page"
k. The file should be in your Home folder, under the PDF folder

Note - in some cases this method will not work because as soon as you try to add aprinter it has not detected a pdf printer. Also, when I tried to edit the configuration file there was not a line that referenced RunAsUser so I eventually added that line but it still did not work. In come the Ubuntu forums to the rescue! I got further instructions and they are outlined below:

a. Install the cups-pdf package (I used version 2.2.0-1)
b. Go to System -> Administration -> Printing
c. Doubleclick "New Pinter"
d. Notice that there is no mention of a CUPS PDF printer
e. Open a terminal and tpe "sudo nautilus" and then your password
f. Go to Filesystem -> usr -> lib -> cups -> backend
g. Rightclick "cups-pdf" and select Properties
h. Go to the Permissions tab and click the "Set user ID" special flag
i. Again try to add a new printer
j. There is now a "PDF Printer" detected, select it
k. Select the Generic, Postscript Color Printer (Rev 3b)
l. Give it a name, like PDF Printer
m. Right click on the newly created printer, and select Properties
n. Click "Print a Test Page"
o. The file should be in your Home folder, under the PDF folder

This got the printer to show up and working;) Yes!



CLCOTW - Command line command of the week: shred
shred - delete a file securely, first overwriting it to hide its contents

SYNOPSIS
shred [OPTIONS] FILE [...]

DESCRIPTION
Overwrite the specified FILE(s) repeatedly, in order to make it harder for even very expensive hardware probing to recover the data. Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options too.

-f, --force
change permissions to allow writing if necessary

-n, --iterations=N
Overwrite N times instead of the default (25)

-s, --size=N
shred this many bytes (suffixes like K, M, G accepted)

-u, --remove
truncate and remove file after overwriting

-v, --verbose
show progress

-x, --exact
do not round file sizes up to the next full block

-z, --zero
add a final overwrite with zeros to hide shredding

Here is the out put of my experiment with shred when I executed the command

shred -fvu freshubuntu.txt

harlem@freshubuntu:~/Desktop$ shred -fvu freshubuntu.txt
shred: freshubuntu.txt: pass 1/25 (random)...
shred: freshubuntu.txt: pass 2/25 (999999)...
shred: freshubuntu.txt: pass 3/25 (924924)...
shred: freshubuntu.txt: pass 4/25 (ffffff)...
shred: freshubuntu.txt: pass 5/25 (dddddd)...
shred: freshubuntu.txt: pass 6/25 (555555)...
shred: freshubuntu.txt: pass 7/25 (bbbbbb)...
shred: freshubuntu.txt: pass 8/25 (888888)...
shred: freshubuntu.txt: pass 9/25 (444444)...
shred: freshubuntu.txt: pass 10/25 (492492)...
shred: freshubuntu.txt: pass 11/25 (aaaaaa)...
shred: freshubuntu.txt: pass 12/25 (db6db6)...
shred: freshubuntu.txt: pass 13/25 (random)...
shred: freshubuntu.txt: pass 14/25 (6db6db)...
shred: freshubuntu.txt: pass 15/25 (000000)...
shred: freshubuntu.txt: pass 16/25 (222222)...
shred: freshubuntu.txt: pass 17/25 (333333)...
shred: freshubuntu.txt: pass 18/25 (b6db6d)...
shred: freshubuntu.txt: pass 19/25 (cccccc)...
shred: freshubuntu.txt: pass 20/25 (111111)...
shred: freshubuntu.txt: pass 21/25 (eeeeee)...
shred: freshubuntu.txt: pass 22/25 (666666)...
shred: freshubuntu.txt: pass 23/25 (777777)...
shred: freshubuntu.txt: pass 24/25 (249249)...
shred: freshubuntu.txt: pass 25/25 (random)...
shred: freshubuntu.txt: removing
shred: freshubuntu.txt: renamed to 000000000000000
shred: 000000000000000: renamed to 00000000000000
shred: 00000000000000: renamed to 0000000000000
shred: 0000000000000: renamed to 000000000000
shred: 000000000000: renamed to 00000000000
shred: 00000000000: renamed to 0000000000
shred: 0000000000: renamed to 000000000
shred: 000000000: renamed to 00000000
shred: 00000000: renamed to 0000000
shred: 0000000: renamed to 000000
shred: 000000: renamed to 00000
shred: 00000: renamed to 0000
shred: 0000: renamed to 000
shred: 000: renamed to 00
shred: 00: renamed to 0
shred: freshubuntu.txt: removed

See you next week.

Welcome - Welcome back, thanks for joining me this week. If you are new to Fresh Ubuntu, this podcast is for people who are moving to the Ubuntu OS from Windows for the first time. More aimed towards new users of linux based operating systems but not necessarily so.

Download the new episode: Fresh Ubuntu #12

Here are the links to the news items:

1. 7 Distro's fight for one old laptop by Rick Lehrbaum

2. Canonical seeks profit from free Ubuntu By Stephen Shankland

3. Firefox Set Free in IceWeasel By Sean Michael Kerner

4. HOWTO: Install IceWeasel 1.5.0.4 in Ubuntu


Main Segment: Install and configure WINE; Install Quicken 2003

a. Sudo apt-get install wine, note, it may be helpful to install 'winetools' as well from source

b. Then run winecfg by pressing alt+f2 and typing in winecfg. Here is a screenshot. Just click on the picture to enlarge it.



Visit the WINE HQ website for lots of helpfull information!

Command Line command of the week

Whereis and which

Results of whereis search using 'ssh'

harlem@freshubuntu:~$whereis ssh

ssh: /usr/bin/ssh - this is where the binary file is
/etc/ssh /usr/bin/X11/ssh - this is where the man page is
/usr/share/man/man1/ssh.1.gz - this is where the source file is

Results of which search using 'ssh'

harlem@freshubuntu:~$which ssh

/usr/bin/ssh - this is just the binary file

Remember, you might need to know this information the next time you need to customize a launcher or menu item.

Hi everyone, welcome back and thanks for joining me this week. For those of you who are new to freshubuntu, this is a podcast that aims to help new users migrate specifically from the windows environment to Ubuntu OS. I have a lot of things planned for us today. I have a few newsworthy items that happened in the past week and then I have a whole bunch of tips to help make life a little easier. Then I will tell you about a great little program called wget. So lets get on with this weeks news items. I got a voice message to ask if I was going to do a podcast about uprading to Edgy Eft and I will undoubtably be doing one. Not only that but I will most likely go through a fresh cd installation of Edgy on my desktop. This future episode will air most likely a week after releas of the stable version of Edgy. But, for now I posted instructions from the ubuntu forums on how to upgrade to the beta version.

Download mp3 here: 011freshubuntu01Oct06.mp3

NEWS

Item #1: Leo at the Podcast Expo -

Item #2: Screenshots of Ubuntu Edgy Eft Beta

Item #3: Bill Clinton wants you to have more Ubuntu!

TIPS GALORE

Ubuntu Tips at the unofficial ubuntu wiki

1. How to restart GNOME without rebooting computer
Press 'Ctrl + Alt + Backspace'
or
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart

2. How to run programs on startup when login into GNOME
* System -> Preferences -> Sessions
* Sessions
Startup Programs Tab -> Add/Edit/Delete

3. Run a terminal command without first opening the terminal
Press 'Alt+F2" and the run application dialog box will pop up; just type in the command you want to run and check mark the box that says wun in terminal. this will open the terminal command and execute the command you issued. This is also helpful for opening other files without starting the application first.

4. Update to Edgy eft Beta
Caution - edgy is not completely stable yet so dont use this as you primary computer or install on a computer that contains high value information.

gksudo "update-manager -c -d"

The "-d" switch instructs Update Manager to consider pre-release versions, including this Beta release. Without this switch, only official, final releases will be considered. The "-c" switch tells it to look for upgrades at all. By default the 6.06 LTS release will not offer that automatically because of its long support cycle and high stability.

If you have a working network connection, it should then inform you about a new release and offer to upgrade your system.

COMMAND LINE COMMAND OF THE WEEK - WGET

Description
GNU Wget is a free utility for non-interactive download of files from the Web. It supports HTTP , HTTPS , and FTP protocols, as well as retrieval through HTTP proxies.

Wget is non-interactive, meaning that it can work in the background, while the user is not logged on. This allows you to start a retrieval and disconnect from the system, letting Wget finish the work. By contrast, most of the Web browsers require constant user’s presence, which can be a great hindrance when transferring a lot of data.

Wget can follow links in HTML pages and create local versions of remote web sites, fully recreating the directory structure of the original site. This is sometimes referred to as ‘‘recursive downloading.’’ While doing that, Wget respects the Robot Exclusion Standard (/robots.txt). Wget can be instructed to convert the links in downloaded HTML files to the local files for offline viewing.

Wget has been designed for robustness over slow or unstable network connections; if a download fails due to a network problem, it will keep retrying until the whole file has been retrieved. If the server supports regetting, it will instruct the server to continue the download from where it left off.

Simple Usage

Say you want to download a URL . Just type:

wget http://fly.srk.fer.hr/

But what will happen if the connection is slow, and the file is lengthy? The connection will probably fail before the whole file is retrieved, more than once. In this case, Wget will try getting the file until it either gets the whole of it, or exceeds the default number of retries (this being 20). It is easy to change the number of tries to 45, to insure that the whole file will arrive safely:

wget --tries=45 http://fly.srk.fer.hr/jpg/flyweb.jpg

Now let’s leave Wget to work in the background, and write its progress to log file log. It is tiring to type --tries, so we shall use -t.

wget -t 45 -o log http://fly.srk.fer.hr/jpg/flyweb.jpg &

The ampersand at the end of the line makes sure that Wget works in the background. To unlimit the number of retries, use -t inf.

The usage of FTP is as simple. Wget will take care of login and password.

wget ftp://gnjilux.srk.fer.hr/welcome.msg

If you specify a directory, Wget will retrieve the directory listing, parse it and convert it to HTML . Try:

wget ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/links index.html

Reformatted the shownotes and added a couple of features

1. Odeo send me a voicemail message.
2. flash player from odeo that plays old episodes of freshubuntu
3. Remember to visit the website freshubuntu.blogspot.com and leave me a comment.
4. Or you can send an email to freshubuntu@gmail.com
5. Remember to vote for me on podcastalley for the month of october I appreciate those who already have.

Bye.