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.

• Cheese
• Chromium Web Browser
• CompizConfig Settings Manager
• Dropbox
• EasyTAG
• Enable Commercial DVD Playback
• FileZilla
• Geany
• Opera Web Browser
• RapidSVN
• Spotify
• The GIMP
• Ubuntu Restricted Extras
• VLC
• Wakoopa

The applications that I install haven’t changed a whole lot over the years, but it leaves me wondering what applications make the cut for others!

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!

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.

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!

Its funny to me, because for a while now I’ve only booted up in Windows to manually run updates and quick virus checks with the occasional Steam gaming session.

I run updates and scans almost religiously, so I know that October 3, 2010 was the last time that I even used this partition. Thats nearly 4 months of booting only in Linux (Ubuntu and Fedora) on my Desktop.

I do, however, use Mac OS X now on my new MacBook though. I’ve still not gotten around to installing Ubuntu on it, but maybe one day I’ll stop being lazy and just give it a spin.

I’ve known for a while that I could finally cut the cord from Windows, but this just officially confirmed it for me. That said, I won’t soon be giving up my free (via School) copy of Windows 7 Professional.

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.

News came out last month that Cr-48 was able to run not just Googles new Chrome OS, but also Ubuntu!

Now, you can apparently also run Windows 7 or Mac OS X!

It seems that nearly everyone agrees that Windicators in Ubuntu is a bad idea. Not only will they add a little confusion to the Ubuntu learning curve, but they will also just add clutter to the title bar. That being said, I for one would like to see them implemented as long as there is an option to enable/disable them freely.

Over the past year or so, Ubuntu has received a great deal of criticism regarding the placement of the window controls for close, minimize and maximize. If you’ve not kept up with this, basically the controls moved from the right side of the title bar (like in Windows) to the left side of the title bar (like in Mac OS X). I still see complaints about this every other day (even though there are ways to change this already posted throughout the net).

With many people accusing Ubuntu of simply trying to look like Mac OS X, I wasn’t as quick to point fingers and agree. I like to hold judgment on products at least until they are completed or deemed “stable”. Lately, however, its beginning to be a chore to deny this “OS X”-like transition with the changes that are coming in Ubuntu 11.04.

Two major changes in Ubuntu 11.04 include:

• a new panel that seems more like a hybrid between the new Windows 7 taskbar and the Mac OS X Dock.
• application menus and application titles in the top panel.

These new changes, paired with the window controls on the left and indicator style menus in the top panel give Ubuntu 11.04 an eerily similar appearance to OS X. Not to mention the windicators (as this post started out talking about)..

If you visit a secure web address in Safari, a lock icon appears in the upper right corner of the title bar to indicate a secure page. I’d not noticed this before, being an Opera fanatic and all, so I’m unable to tell who was first: the idea of Windicators or this feature in Safari.

Safari seems to pull this off well and the icon isn’t in my way at all. This is one reason why I would like to see them appear in Ubuntu eventually, but only if they can easily be disabled and they are implemented correctly.

Last that I heard, Windicators were put on the back burner to let more important features reach the public first (as they should be). Lets just hope that if Ubuntu continues to follow a close path to Mac OS X that they follow a better path.

What do you think about the similarities? Too similar? Not similar enough? Not similar at all? Or you don’t care?

The next version of Ubuntu is currently, as you may already know, undergoing some fairly drastic interface changes. Ubuntu will be abandoning the use of the traditional GNOME panels and instead use an improved version of their Unity interface.

Lurking through several bugs on launchpad, I stumbled across an interesting one with one interesting mockup in particular.

While its just a suggestion mockup, I think it actually looks rather slick. I’m not saying its the best approach, but certainly one worth noting! According to a follow-up comment, this design is similar to what Gnome Shell is doing, but I’ve not yet looked into Gnome Shell so I can’t confirm this. Either way, its a smooth approach.

Currently Unity doesn’t have a method of letting you know which application’s menu its showing in the top panel. There is an indicator icon in the side dock/panel, but as best I can tell they are planning to add the app name to the top panel similar to the way Mac OS X handles this. Maybe it will be in some Unity updates tomorrow!