Ubuntu Release Naming Scheme

The official name of an Ubuntu release is "Ubuntu X.YY" with X representing the year (minus 2000) and YY representing the month of eventual release within in that year. Ubuntu's first release, made in 2004 October (10th month) was Ubuntu 4.10. Since the actual release date is not known until it's ready and humans tend to prefer names rather than numbers, a set of code names are used by developers and testers during the build up to a release:

Adjective	Animal	Version	Description
Warty	Warthog	4.10	The first "hog"
Hoary	Hedgehog	5.04	Meaning "covered with hair", or "mature/old/wise"
Breezy	Badger	5.10	was going to be "Bendy Badger"...
Dapper	Drake	6.06	Polished, with 5 years of support!
Edgy	Eft	6.10	Fire up the crackpipes! (?!)
Feisty	Fawn	7.04	Courage and restlessness
Gutsy	Gibbon	7.10	Go Ape!
Hardy	Heron	8.04	Hardy Heron with 5 years of support! Most people wanted Happy/Hungry Hippo
Intrepid	Ibex	8.10	Released October 2008
Jaunty	Jackalope	9.04	Released April 2009
Karmic	Koala	9.10	Released October 2009
Lucid	Lynx	10.04

The development codename of a release takes the form "Adjective Animal". So for example: Warty Warthog (Ubuntu 4.10), Hoary Hedgehog (Ubuntu 5.04), Breezy Badger (Ubuntu 5.10), are the first three releases of Ubuntu. In general, people refer to the release using the adjective, like "warty" or "breezy".

list your hardware with lshw

lshw is a handy command to look at your hardware.
To utilize its full capability you should be in root account.
Here is some sample output I got.

$ lshw

*-network
description: Wireless interface
product: RT2561/RT61 802.11g PCI
vendor: RaLink
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:03:00.0
logical name: wlan0
version: 00
serial: 00:21:29:6a:33:fc
width: 32 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: bus_master cap_list ethernet physical wireless
configuration: broadcast=yes driver=rt61pci ip=192.168.1.2 latency=64 multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11bg
resources: irq:20 memory:fdbf8000-fdbfffff

lshw can take several arguments. Look at manpages for lshw for full details.

How to reset Gnome-panel

 If your gnome panel goes haywire after tinkering , here is an easy tip to reset it back to normal

  gconftool-2 --recursive-unset /apps/panel

Boot up ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx faster

With  ubuntu 10.04 you can enable profiling option  at boot time to speed up booting. The system will  remember your previous profile and quickly boot using it . You can enable profiling using the following. steps.

1. At your boot screen press “e” (for edit).
2. Use your arrow key and move down to the entry beginning with “kernel”.
3. Press “e” again.
4. Add “profile” (no quotes) at the end of this line.
5. Hit Enter.
6. Click “b” (for boot).

 . Your next boot should be considerably faster.

Booting iso images with GRUB 2

With thousdands of linux distributions around , booting iso images with out burning it to a cd or dvd  saves a lot of money and effort.   Let us try to boot system rescue cd. I have  ubuntu  lucid lynx installed on my laptop. Let us see how to boot   system rescue cd  from the iso image.   Get the latest system  rescue cd from here.
I keep all my iso images under /boot/iso folder . You can choose a different folder. (but note the exact path)

Add  the following lines to   /etc/grub.d/40_custom file
 
menuentry "SystemRescue CD ISO" {
loopback loop (hd0,1)/boot/iso/systemrescuecd-x86-1.5.8.iso
linux (loop)/isolinux/rescue64 setkmap=us isoloop=/systemrescuecd-x86-1.5.8.iso
initrd (loop)/isolinux/initram.igz
}


 You may have to tweak ( hd0,1 ) depending on  the location of your  iso image.   The line  
   

  loopback loop (hd0,1)/boot/iso/systemrescuecd-x86-1.5.8.iso

 above  mounts the iso image to  "loop".   The remaining lines specify kernel and initram image within the iso image.  


Now run "sudo update-grub" after saving /etc/grub.d/40_custom to include the new entries into the Grub 2 menu

sun java 6 on lucid lynx

To install sun-java6-jre on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, type the commands below in Terminal:
 

sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://archive.canonical.com/ lucid partner" 
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre

Installing Skype on ubuntu 10.04

Since ubuntu  10.04 Skype is part of the Canonical partner repository . Hence you can to install Skype  easily.  

    To install Skype in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx from the partner repository, go to System > Administration > Software Sources and on the "Other software" tab, enable (check the box next to it) the "http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu lucid partner" repository.
Now open a terminal and type 

$ sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude install skype

Enjoy skype 

How to protect a password file in linux

A simple way to encrypt a file with a password is to use gpg (GnuPG). Suppose we have a file mysamplefile.txt, to encrypt it type the following on console.

$ gpg -c mysamplefile.txt

You will be asked to enter a paraphrase twice
A new file named mysamplefile.txt.gpg will be created.

To decrypt the file type
$ gpg mysamplefile.txt

Again it will ask the paraphrase and decrypt the file.

Window control buttons on Ubuntu 10.04

 The window control button layout on new ubuntu 10.04 is very confusing to me. I just wanted to shift them to the right as shown below.

The easiest way is to download and install ubuntu tweaks from here. When installed ubuntu tweaks shows up under Applications ->System tools -> Ubuntu Tweaks. Launch it  and select window  manager setting on the left panel.

  
   You can rearrange the control button and title bar by dragging them to appropriate positions as shown below.

Some great software you miss on Ubuntu 10.04

Here is a list of software you must install to make your life easier on Ubuntu 10.04
 VLC 
 Thunderbird,
 Geany,
 gPodder,
 Deluge,
 Banshee,
 Gnome-Do,
 x-chat,
 wine,
 virtualbox,
 ubuntu-tweak,
 imagemagick,
 filezilla,
 clamtk,
 GIMP

Play back DVDs on Ubuntu Lucid Lynx

 It is pretty simple

  $ sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras
  $  sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh

Done

Managing archives with UNP

Install unp and forget about all worries about archives.

$ sudo apt-get install unp

Extract any archive with
$ unp archive_file

where "archive_file" can be a rar, zip, tar.gz, deb,
tar.gz2, rpm or any other archive.

Virtual box truubles on Lucid

Last night I upgraded to lucid. Every thing seemed to work smoothly. Then I tried virtual box. It failed saying that the kernel modules are not loaded. I quikly fixed the problem with
~$ sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv  setup
Then virtual box started showing the following error message.

VirtualBox can't operate in VMX root mode. Please disable the KVM kernel extension, recompile your kernel and reboot (VERR_VMX_IN_VMX_ROOT_MODE).

 The following  commands fixed it.
$ sudo modprobe -r kvm-intel
$ sudo modprobe -r kvm-amd