Things you’ll need

1. Windows 7 x64 disc image
2. Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool
3. 32-bit bootsect.exe

Create the installer

1. Install the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool.
2. Extract the 32-bit bootsect.exe file to the directory that the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool was installed to. This is usually something like “C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Apps\Windows 7 USB DVD Download Tool“.
3. Run the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool and select your Windows 7 disc image. Follow the remaining steps in this tool and your image should be created successfully!

If you’ve followed these steps and your flash installer was created successfully then your next step is to, of course, install Windows 7! Don’t forget to change your boot options to load from USB!

This information is scattered on the web and slightly detailed on the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool page, but I was not able to find a guide laid out as simplified as the one I’ve provided above. In most tutorials they suggest that you download the entire 32-bit iso in order to get the 32-bit bootsect.exe application, but I’ve made that step a lot less troublesome. Hopefully this has helped you!

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If you have an Nvidia card, especially the 7300le model like I have, and have had difficulties using Unity 3D with the proprietary drivers, then you may have experienced this bug: [nvidia, 7300, 7400] display freeze when using unity desktop

Nvidia has just released an update which resolves this issue and it can easily be installed right away!

Release highlights since 275.36:

• Fixed a bug that would cause Firefox to abort on pages with Flash when layers acceleration was force-enabled on Linux and Solaris.
• Fixed a bug that could cause display devices on a secondary GPU to get swapped between X screens when restarting the X server.
• Fixed a regression that caused blank/white windows when exhausting video memory on GeForce 6 and 7 series GPUs while using composited desktops.
• Fixed a bug that caused a crash when glDrawArrays was used with a non-VBO vertex attribute array to draw on a Xinerama screen other than screen 0 using an indirect GLX context.

The 275.43 NVIDIA Accelerated Linux Graphics Driver Set for Linux/x86 is available for download via FTP.

The 275.43 NVIDIA Accelerated Linux Graphics Driver Set for Linux/x86_64 is available for download via FTP.

 

Please see the README (x86 / x86_64) for more information about this release.

 

Please note: This NVIDIA Linux graphics driver release supports GeForce 6xxx and newer NVIDIA GPUs, GeForce4 and older GPUs are supported through the 96.43.xx and 71.86.xx NVIDIA legacy graphics drivers. GeForce FX GPUs are supported through the 173.14.xx NVIDIA legacy graphics drivers.

 

Please also note: If you encounter any problems with the 275.43 NVIDIA Linux graphics driver release, please start a new thread and include a detailed description of the problem, reproduction steps and generate/attach an nvidia-bug-report.log.gz file (please see http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=46678 for details).

If you’re seeing the same problem and would like to test the update, there are a few specific instructions that you may (or may not) need to follow, posted here.

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Mac and Linux use a graphical front-end for Synergy known as QuickSynergy. Here’s how to get it configured for use between Mac and Ubuntu…

Hostnames

You can find the hostnames to use simply by opening a Terminal window, or if you’re unsure still, simply type hostname and press enter.

If you used the hostname command in Ubuntu, you probably noticed that the “.local” part is not printed out, but it is necessary when dealing with Mac OS X.

Connecting the Two

After selecting the system you’d like to share, configure the Use or Share tab as necessary similar to the examples below:

After configuring Synergy/QuickSynergy you’re all set to start making your life easier!

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With my Unity Opera script, you’ll be able to get extra functionality for Opera by simply downloading a script and adding it to your Startup Applications list. No technical modifications necessary!

The Launcher API provides four features at the moment: Count, Progress, Urgency, Quicklists.

At the moment I’m only able to implement functionality for three of these, with the exception being Progress. In its current implementation, Unity Opera has the following features:

Count

The total number of tabs you have open appears on the Launcher icon and is updated in real time as you open and close tabs.

One item to note here is that Opera’s Private tabs are not included in this tab count. Since information about these tabs and their contents are not stored anywhere on your computer, Unity Opera has no way of discovering them.

Progress

At this point in time, the progress functionality for this script is not available. Until I find a way to programmatically determine download progress in Opera, I will not be able to implement this.

If you have any information regarding a way to implement this feature then please let me know!

Urgency

When browsing the net, not every link you click on is from inside the web browser. Sometimes you click a link from an instant message, mail client, Gwibber, etc. This is where urgency comes into play.

Typically clicking these links automatically opens the tab in your browser, but it doesn’t always pull you’re browser into focus. When this happens, you may not know which browser the link opened in or if clicking it was even successful.

When Opera is not in focus and a new tab is opened, the Opera icon in the Launcher now enters urgency mode and wiggles onces. An urgency highlight is also applied to the icon and a small attention reminder in the upper left corner until you focus Opera again (this clears the urgency setting).

Quicklists

Previously I shared a tip on how to customize your Quicklists for Opera. That method meant that you had to manually open and edit the desktop file.

This is no longer the case, as these features are already built into Unity Opera.

On top of that, your Speed Dial items are also appended to the Quicklist, making your life that much easier!

If you use Opera’s built in Mail client, also known as M2, then you will see an Opera for Mail, which is intended to open M2 directly. At the moment, this feature doesn’t work as intended, but hopefully in due time it will.

Download Unity Opera

Unity Opera is written in python and can easily be updated and maintained. I suggest you save and extract it to your Home directory and use it there, but you are free to place it anywhere you wish.

Download

Running Unity Opera

You can run Unity Opera in one of two ways:

1. The easiest way in my opinion is to simply add it to your Startup Applications.

To do this simply open your dash and search for ‘Startup Applications‘. Once there, click ‘Add‘ and fill in the blanks!

To run Unity Opera on startup, I place the script in my home folder. You can place it where ever you wish, but if you pick a place other than your home folder then you will need to provide a full path the script in your startup command.

An example of what I use is as follows:

python unity-opera.py

2. The other option is to open a terminal when you want to use this script and run the command above.

Options

This script has several options. For help and more information type:

python unity-opera.py –help

This script accepts two optional args:

1. Opera Channel: This is used for setting Unity Opera to run against regular Opera and the new Opera Next channel. By default, if you exclude this arg, Opera is set as the browser to run against. Examples of this command include:

python unity-opera.py opera

python unity-opera.py opera-next

2. Enable features: This is used to enable specific features. You can enable only basic quicklists [q], quicklists with Speed Dial entries [qs], tab count [c], urgency notification [u], and progress [p].

As mentioned before, progress is not functional at the moment, but I’ve built the script with this feature ready to include as soon as I find a way.

This second argument requires the use of the first argument. Examples of this command include:

python unity-opera.py opera -qs

python unity-opera.py opera-next -qsu

Troubleshooting

If you experience trouble with this script, please try running it from a terminal to see if there are any errors output to the console. If so, copy and paste these in the comments below and I will take a look at them.

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After reading his post and seeing how easy it was to add new Quicklist entries, I decided to give it a go with Opera.

As you can see, my efforts were successful, but there are many more list items you could add to customize Opera’s Quicklist to suit your needs.

Get It for Yourself

If you’re using Ubuntu 11.04 with Unity and want to customize this menu for yourself then just follow follow these simple steps.

1. Open a terminal and type the following (and enter your password when prompted):
sudo gedit /usr/share/applications/opera-browser.desktop

2. Scroll down to the bottom of this open file and paste the following:
X-Ayatana-Desktop-Shortcuts=NewTab;NewPrivateTab;NewWindow;Mail;

[NewTab Shortcut Group]
Name=New Tab
Exec=opera -newtab
TargetEnvironment=Unity

[NewPrivateTab Shortcut Group]
Name=New Private Tab
Exec=opera -newprivatetab
TargetEnvironment=Unity

[NewWindow Shortcut Group]
Name=New Window
Exec=opera -newwindow
TargetEnvironment=Unity

[Mail Shortcut Group]
Name=Mail
Exec=opera -mail
TargetEnvironment=Unity

3. Save and close the text editor. You may need to restart Unity or your computer before changes take effect.

Customize your Quicklist

If you’d like to add more items to the Quicklist, simply add a shortcut name for it in “X-Ayatana-Desktop-Shortcuts" and create a "Shortcut Group" for it.

A couple of things that I considered adding were Gmail and Google Reader so that they simply open in new tabs. I’m sure you can find other useful shortcuts to add or maybe even more Opera command line options!

Remove your Changes

If you don’t like the Quicklist items that you’ve added, all you need to do is open the opera-browser.desktop file and remove the lines that were added. Save, close and voila.

Conclusion

Quicklists are great, but they would be more useful with Opera if we were able to select from a list of open or recent tabs.

The new tab and window shortcuts that I’ve added are enough for me at the moment, but I would really love to see them added by default in the near future!

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With a little free time on my hands I decided to set it up and see what all the fuss was about. At the time I was installing the Tor components in OS X, but I was curious about installing it in Ubuntu and the resources and instructions that I came across were not as straight forward as they could have been. That is where this post comes it, to provide a simple step by step guide with no fuss.

What is Tor?

This is how Wikipedia explains Tor:

Tor is a system intended to enable online anonymity, composed of client software and a network of servers which can hide information about users’ locations and other factors which might identify them. Use of this system makes it more difficult to trace internet traffic to the user, including visits to Web sites, online posts, instant messages, and other communication forms. It is intended to protect users’ personal freedom, privacy, and ability to conduct confidential business, by keeping their internet activities from being monitored.

What does it look like?

Tor itself doesn’t have a graphical user interface (GUI), but there is an application known as Vidalia which provides a nice and simple user interface for controlling all of your Tor needs.

When installing Tor in Ubuntu, you will need to install 3 components: Tor, Polipo, and Vidalia. Tor and Vidalia should now be obvious to you (since I’ve explained that Vidalia provides a GUI to Tor).

Again, according to Wikipedia here is what Polipo is:

Polipo is a fast and lightweight, forwarding and caching proxy server, SOCKS proxy and computer software daemon.

Install Tor in Ubuntu

This is really quite simple and I could easily provide a simple bash script to automate all of this for you, but that would mean that I would have to maintain it and that you wouldn’t learn anything.

For simplicity, I will write this guide assuming you are using Ubuntu 10.10, aka Maverick. If you’re using a different version, make sure you change the necessary bits below.

1. Open “Software Sources,” select the “Other Software” tab, click the “Add” button at the bottom and paste the following:

   deb http://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org maverick main

   Click “Add Source,” then click Close. When it asks if you want to Reload, click yes and ignore any errors for now.

2. Open a Terminal and add the Tor Repository keys and update Apt:

   gpg –keyserver keys.gnupg.net –recv 886DDD89
   gpg –export A3C4F0F979CAA22CDBA8F512EE8CBC9E886DDD89 | sudo apt-key add -
   sudo apt-get update

3. Install Tor, Polipo, and Vidalia:

   sudo apt-get install tor tor-geoipdb polipo vidalia -y

   When prompted during the installation of Vidalia, select the option to permanently replace (or however it is worded).

4. Download a pre-made config file for Polipo:

   wget https://gitweb.torproject.org/torbrowser.git/blob_plain/HEAD:/build-scripts/config/polipo.conf
   sudo mv /etc/polipo/config /etc/polipo/config.bak
   sudo mv polipo.conf /etc/polipo/config

5. Now Stop and Restart both Tor and Polipo for safe measure:

   sudo /etc/init.d/tor stop
   sudo /etc/init.d/polipo stop
   sudo /etc/init.d/polipo start

   Open the application Vidalia when you would like to connect to the Tor network. If you want it on by default, you can always set Vidalia to autostart with your computer.

6. All thats left is to configure your Applications to use the Tor proxies! If you don’t adjust the network settings of your applications to use the Tor proxy settings then you’re not using Tor at all. You can confirm that Tor is indeed working by visiting the Tor detector page.

If you run into issues for any reason, check back through the steps listed above. If that still doesn’t fix them, you might check the Community Ubuntu Documentation on Tor page or the official Tor for Linux/BSD/Unix page.

Configuring applications to use the Tor proxies

There are 2 types of configurations for Tor:

1. HTTP or HTTPS – Typically used for web browsers such as Opera, Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome, etc.

   Host: 127.0.0.1
   Port: 8118

2. Sockets – Typcially used for instant messaging applications such as Trillian, Digsby, MSN, AOL, Empathy, Pidgin, etc.

   Host: 127.0.0.1
   Port: 9050

Nearly any application that allows you to adjust network settings by using proxies can make use of the Tor Anonymity Network. Configuring your application of choice is a matter of selection to use HTTP or Sockets.

If you’re unsure, use trial and error.

A great note that I came across on the Community Ubuntu Documentation page for Tor that I think everyone should read carefully before using Tor is as follows:

What’s the use of having Tor and Privoxy setup without enabling your new anonymous proxy in your common web applications? At this time Tor only supports HTTP and HTTPS traffic, but still recommends using Tor in your browser’s proxy settings for all protocols as a hidden image link can give away your IP address if linked to an image on an FTP site.

Conclusion

Hopefully by this point you’ve successfully configured Tor for all of your anonymity needs. Will Tor works great, it only works great if you’ve configured it correctly.

Some Tor connections may be slower than others. If you’re experiencing a connection that is simply too slow for your needs or if you need a new ip address so you can get that file from RapidShare without having to wait for an hour, simply open Vidalia Control Panel and click “Use a New Identity.”

Remember that Tor can be used for Windows and Mac, and is more straightforward to install for them as well.

While there have been a few flaws exposed, as mentioned before, I would tend to think the risk of being identified over Tor is very low since the attacks would have to occur on the same network that you’re connected to. I typically only use Tor at public internet access points (which is where these attacks would be most likely to occur), but it can be very handy in many situations and will likely continue to be on the list of my apps to install for a long long time.

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Before

After

To use this, all you have to do is download and install the Stylesheet or UserJS file and configure it in your browser! I’m using the UserJS version, but you may prefer the other. Either way, enjoy!

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If you’re interested in letting your Feed client simplify your life by bringing the Steam updates directly to you then I suggest you subscribe to the feed that I’ve setup (via a great free service call Feed For Free).

The Steam News – Specials feed:

http://feed43.com/4758788726706067.xml

The Steam News – Announcements feed:

http://feed43.com/7724635415454743.xml

When I searched for a feed for these Specials I came across one forum post after another asking the same thing. We all know how annoying that can be, so to remedy the situation I decided to post a solution myself.

As you can see below, these pages don’t have feeds of their own, but the very awesome Feed For Free site will let you pull the updates straight into your feed reader with ease. See my Google Reader pictured below.

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Well, it took me over a month to get around to looking into the update, but ironically there is a backport posted at WebUpd8 that makes installing this in Ubuntu 10.10 as easy as copy-n-pasting three commands into the terminal!

The Last.fm updates (thanks to Jamie Nicol’s GSoC project) have finally been added and I was obsessively tracking the code commits each day to watch the progress while it was going on. Now that I get to test out the changes, I’ve glad to say that the Last.fm improvements are grand!

The new support for DACP, which allows you to use your iPhone/iPod touch/iPad as a remote for iTunes,  now allows you to remotely change the tunes playing in Rhythmbox!

Unfortunately, this feature doesn’t seem to currently support sending cover art embedded in the media files’ metadata to the remote. I’ve seen discussions about this recently in the mailing list, so this will likely change before too long!

One last improvement that I have to mention is the “Various fixes for iPod support” as this is one area that I’ve felt is constantly in need of improvement with each new release of iOS and each new model. There are also a great deal of other improvements which I’ll list below directly from the mailing list (via Jonathan Matthew)!

Rhythmbox 0.13.2 (“Dagger”) is now available from
http://download.gnome.org/sources/rhythmbox/0.13/

f422e47d7e238ebe862650efbcb83672bca704df0a37c3391ad0e386c20b19e3
rhythmbox-0.13.2.tar.bz2
4ad881cfbe19abcbe21abcfb37f753476b928141cea662c732867c9f4363aacb
rhythmbox-0.13.2.tar.gz

Highlights:
* Much improved Last.fm (and Libre.fm) plugin (Jamie Nicol’s GSoC project)
* Support for DACP (iTunes remote) (Alexandre Rosenfeld’s GSoC project)
* Zeitgeist plugin (developed by Markus Korn, Laszlo Pandy and Michal Hruby)
* New podcast sub-sources showing newly posted and recently downloaded episodes
* Slightly improved integration with the GNOME Shell message tray
* Various fixes for iPod support (Christophe Fergeau, Ben Walsh)

Bugs fixed:
341462 – Make current podcast downloads more visible
345957 – View last.fm profile
381679 – Add “record to profile” toggle to the last.fm plugin
589886 – Crash when selecting multiple podcast feeds
591841 – Crash processing playlist files from command line
592428 – Allow the user to select Libre.fm as their audioscrobbler service
601152 – can’t really create playlists on iPod
604170 – Unable to change the order of files in an iPOD playlist
612156 – crash when stopping radio stream before playlist parsing has finished
618619 – Crash while getting properties from ipod shuffle
623200 – Add previous and play actions to notifications, and use id’s
that correspond to named icons
625030 – Use XSPF format for the default iRadio playlist
625054 – Rhythmbox transfers music to my generic MP3 player without
file extensions
625214 – DACP Support in Rhythmbox
628254 – metadata helper crashes when tagging MP3 files that don’t
already have tags
628791 – crash showing ipod properties if the ipod database can’t be read
628794 – Rhythmbox can not share to iTunes 10 using DAAP
629038 – coherence plugin breakage
630689 – drop GtkObject use
631008 – Zeitgeist plugin
631191 – GStreamer MTP source element stopped working
631218 – don’t open (some) iframes in podcast descriptions in new
browser windows
631355 – Typo in string: “Listended”
631698 – Rhythmbox stars (ratings) not updated properly when scrolling
up in the playlist
631817 – rhythmbox hangs when starting playing next audio cd track
632119 – Add WSUM 91.7FM (University of Wisconsin) to iRadio-Initial.pls
632475 – ipod “Remove from playlist” was completely removing from iPod
632655 – URL updates for Internet Radio stations
633531 – Rhythmbox can’t load Cover-Art from musicbrainz

Translation updates:
- bg, courtesy of Krasimir Chonov
- ca@valencia, courtesy of Joan Duran
- cs, courtesy of Marek Černocký
- da, courtesy of Ask Hjorth Larsen
- de, courtesy of Christian Kirbach
- el, courtesy of Michael Kotsarinis
- es, courtesy of Jorge González
- et, courtesy of Mattias Põldaru
- gl, courtesy of Fran Diéguez
- hu, courtesy of Gabor Kelemen
- it, courtesy of Luca Ferretti
- ja, courtesy of Hiroyuki Sekihara
- ja, courtesy of Takayuki KUSANO
- lt, courtesy of Žygimantas Beručka
- nb, courtesy of Kjartan Maraas
- nl, courtesy of Redmar
- pa, courtesy of A S Alam
- pl, courtesy of Piotr Drąg
- pt_BR, courtesy of Djavan Fagundes
- ru, courtesy of Yuri Myasoedov
- sl, courtesy of Andrej Žnidaršič
- sv, courtesy of Daniel Nylander

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I wouldn’t consider myself a Mac fanatic (yet), but its difficult to not fall in love with the great amount of attention to detail.

Out of curiosity, I decided to look into macifying Ubuntu again (as I’ve looked into in the past and had decent results) only this time I came across Macbuntu. Macbuntu is an all-in-one package to transform your Ubuntu desktop (fresh dual screen account pictured below) from this:

Before

To something that resembles the infamous Mac OS X a little more closely, like this:

After

For an Mac purist, this transformation pack would be no where near acceptable with small differences and quirks here and there. The good news, however, is that the transformation pack appears to be maintained and updated regularly so it may not be much longer before your Linux box is indistinguishable from an original Mac…at least on the inside.

The Macbuntu installation is extremely easy. If you’re interested in installing this, but afraid of messing anything up, keep in mind that there is an uninstall option that is extremely painless and it restores all of your original settings!

Install

1. Download the transformation package from SourceForge or GNOME-Look.org if you prefer (but they are both hosted from SourceForge) and save it to your Desktop.
2. Extract the package to your Desktop. You can do this by right clicking and selecting “Extract Here” from the menu.
3. Open a terminal and type “cd Desktop/Macbuntu-10.10/” (without the quotes) and press enter.
4. Now type “./install.sh” (without quotes) and press enter.
5. Follow the directions and answer a few questions and it does all of the rest! …and you’re done!

Uninstall

1. If you’ve deleted the original files that your extracted before, re-download them and extract them using the same steps as before.
2. Open a terminal and type “cd Desktop/Macbuntu-10.10/” (without the quotes) and press enter.
3. Now type “./uninstall.sh” (without quotes) and press enter.
4. Follow any directions or quick questions and before you know it, things will be back to the way they were before!

While I was impressed with the degree of success after I installed this transformation pack, I quickly uninstalled it. Part of this was due to pure testing, but the other part was simply because I want to spend more time tweaking it to perfection later and don’t have the time right now.

Amazingly, I was able to take a stock Ubuntu 10.10 desktop and morph it into a decent OS X lookalike and back again all in a matter of 15 minutes, and that includes a short amount of time spent looking around.

My Notes & Ramblings (probably boring)

One thing I’d really like to do is to create a Mac OS X skin for Opera to be included with this package since the one for Opera for Mac isn’t compatible with other platforms (afaik). I’d also like to figure out how to get the full menu bar removed and placed into the top panel properly, where it was only partially added in the screenshots.

A lot of the dock details are accurate, but then again a lot of them are just flat wrong. Empathy needs an icon replacement to Adium or iChat. The dock itself is angled slightly higher and the gloss detail is completely different (lacking the wavy design). The separator is also incorrect and needs to be updated.

One thing that I think would go far with adding a genuine feel is to organize the Dock icons properly as the default dock icons are in a specific order already and the order from this install seems to be somewhat random in some cases.

Stacks would be great, however, I recall hearing not long ago that this or a similar feature is on the way already possible, just not included yet (maybe I’ll send them an email soon ).

A white drop-shadow for text and icons in the top panel would be great for perfection. It also wouldn’t hurt to add the default slight transparency to the top panel so the background and shine through a little.

The actual theme being used appears to be very outdated, with buttons using old icons such as the back and forward buttons in Nautilus. The breadcrumbs are also very outdated visually and need to be updated. The author(s) of the transformation pack probably have nothing to do with the development of the theme that’s packaged with it, but this is the most important element and is in dire need of some TLC.

Conclusion

Macbuntu is a great and quick solution, but its not pixel perfect or even close to pixel perfect. If you’ve got any suggestions or know of better options such as themes or tweaks, I’d love to hear about them in the comments!

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