Sweet, the latest release of Ubuntu dubbed Hardy Heron is out!

There are a lot of new changes under the hood. Most notable are:

• Installation is a breeze.
• Wubi: one-click installer for Windows.
• Xorg 7.3 with better defaults and auto-configuration of external screens.
• Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 5 in preparation for the official release of Firefox 3 in June.
• PulseAudio: new audio driver.
• Brasero: a new CD/DVD burning utility.
• Transmission: the new default BitTorrent client.
• New theme.
• Compiz: Enabled by default for eye-candy.
• Vinagre: New VNC client. Also uses Avahi to discover VNC enabled clients on the network.
• PolicyKit: enhanced security.

I am currently in the process of migrating /home to its own partition so that I can go ahead and upgrade to Hardy Heron as soon as possible.

I finally got around to installing VirtualBox on Ubuntu Breezy Badger, and it works like a charm. I created a virtual machine and installed Windows XP with JeOS for running Lotus Notes (not by choice). I can finally blow away my Windows partition. Oh happy days!

I wrote earlier about using Mingle on a Nintendo Wii as an Agile project management tool. I figured it would be cumbersome to lug around a data projector, laptop, Airport Express, and Nintendo Wii to every meeting in which you want to use Mingle, such as a Showcase or technical stand-up. Not to mention the setup time in establishing a connection between the Wii and your Wi-Fi access point. So wouldn’t it be nice to remove the Nintendo Wii and the Airport Express from the equation and just use the Wiimote with your laptop? Well you can do just that, and it is really easy to setup on Ubuntu!

You can follow these instructions or just run the following in a terminal.

• Install Wiimote drivers using apt-get. Could it be any easier?
  $ sudo apt-get install libcwiid0 lswm wmgui wminput
• Test Wiimote connection with your Bluetooth dongle. You should just plug in your USB Bluetooth dongle and Bluez will enable Bluetooth for you, assuming it has a driver that can support your dongle. I just have a run-of-the-mill ASUS Bluetooth dongle.
  $ wmgui
  Select Connect from the menu and hold buttons 1 and 2 on your Wiimote to make it discoverable. You may need to do this a couple of times before wmgui picks up your Wiimote before timing out. Once connected, wmgui allows you to test the inputs of your Wiimote. You can enable rumble and accelerometer inputs from the menus.
• Run the mouse emulator.
  
$ sudo modprobe uinput
$ sudo wminput

  Then put your Wiimote into discoverable mode by holding buttons 1 and 2 together again.
• The man pages for wminput does not recommend running wminput as root. So run the following command so that you can gain access to /dev/input/uinput without having to use sudo.
  $ sudo sh -c 'echo "KERNEL==\"uinput\", GROUP=\"admin\"" > /etc/udev/rules.d/50-cwiid-input.rules' /etc/init.d/udev restart

You should now be able to move the cursor around using your Wiimote, and using the A and B buttons as left and right clicks respectively. However, using the accelerometer alone for moving the cursor around does not make for a great user experience. The wminput driver is configured by default for the accelerometer, and if you want to move windows around with your Wiimote, then you’ll need to use the IR configurations instead. Simply replace the default soft link to the accelerometer config file with the ir_ptr config file.

• $ cd /etc/cwiid/wminput
• $ sudo rm default
• $ sudo ln -s ir_ptr default

The Wiimote now needs a point of reference to use when sending coordinates back to the CWiiD driver. This is what the Sensor Bar is for. The Sensor Bar is simply an array of infra red LEDs that creates a plane for the Wiimote as a point of reference. The plane is used for rotation instructions such as the rotating hand effect on the Wii. You can’t use the Wii Sensor Bar with your laptop as it doesn’t have USB or a compatible connector with the laptop. I ended up building my own USB Sensor Bar, and will write about my experience in a later post. It was relatively simple and works quite well. However, it does require doing a bit of soldering, so if you aren’t comfortable with DIY electronics then I would recommend getting a Nyco battery powered Sensor Bar from eBay.

Now you should be able to fire up Mingle and start moving those story cards around on your laptop with just your Wiimote!

If you are using a Mac then you might want to try Darwin Remote [Free] or Remote Buddy [Not Free]. Windows users can use GlovePie or WiinRemote.

I got my iBurst card working on Ubuntu 7.10 (aka Gutsy Gibbon). You need to download the latest iBurst driver called ibdriver, then build and install it. Configure some pcmcia files, run pppoeconf and you should be able to connect to the Internet. The following describes what I did to get my iBurst working on Gutsy Gibbon.

1. Make sure you have libc6-dev installed.

$ sudo apt-get install libc6-dev

2. Download ibdriver 1.3.2 from Sourceforge.

3. Move the tarball to a temporary build folder and untar it.

$ mv ~/Desktop/ibdriver-1.3.2-linux-2.6.20.tar.gz ~/src/build
$ tar zxvf ibdriver-1.3.2-linux-2.6.20.tar.gz

4. Make and install the driver.

$ cd ~/src/build/ibdriver-1.3.2-linux-2.6.20
$ make
$ sudo make install

5. Configure the PCMCIA files.

$ gksudo gedit /etc/pcmcia/config.opts

Add the following at the end of the config file.

# iBurst card
device "iburst_cs"
class "network" module "ib-pcmcia"

card "ArrayComm ut02"
manfid 0x02e3, 0x0002
bind "iburst_cs"


Create the /etc/modprobe.d/iburst file.

$ gksudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/iburst

Add the following text to the file, save and close the file.

options ib-net ifname="eth%d"


6. It is a good idea to restart your laptop at this point. Plug in your PCMCIA iBurst card and use pccardctl to check that the card was detected by the driver.

$ pccardctl status

You should see that the device is bound to the “iburst_cs” driver.

7. Run pppoeconf to connect to your iBurst provider.

$ sudo pppoeconf

A text-based menu program will guide you through the next steps, which are:

• Confirm that your Ethernet card is detected.
• Enter your username.
• Enter your password.
• If you already have a PPPoE Connection configured, you will be asked if it may be modified.
• Popular options: you are asked if you want the “noauth” and “defaultroute” options and to remove “nodetach” - choose Yes.
• Use peer DNS - choose Yes.
• Limited MSS problem - choose Yes.
• When you are asked if you want to connect at start up, you will probably want to say yes.
• Finally you are asked if you want to establish the connection immediately.

Once you have finished these steps, your connection should be working.

8. Starting the connection.

$ sudo pon dsl-provider

9. Stopping the connection.

$ sudo poff dsl-provider

Goodbye Windows, and welcome back Ubuntu my long lost friend. Finally after a year of working with Windows I managed to find some time to get rid of it and install Ubuntu on my work laptop instead. I can’t tell you how much I missed not having apt-get! I am absolutely thrilled to be using Ubuntu again, and with Compiz now a part of Gutsy Gibbon I no longer have OS X envy anymore. Really I don’t, I haven’t touched my eMac in days, mostly due to wasting so much time tweaking Gnome with eye candy that my eyes hurt.

Furthermore, I made the switch because developing Ruby on Rails applications on Windows is such a pain, and most developers know this, so they go out and buy Macs. Well my friends, you can save your dosh and turn your stock standard Dell into a kick arse development environment for Rails. Just check out the screenshot of my desktop below.

I am using Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon with Compiz and Emerald. I also have AWN installed for the dock functionality. For Ruby on Rails development I am using a tweaked version of Gedit with plugins that provide much of the functionality of Textmate and more. You can also get Gedit to recognise rhtml files, and provide a real terminal for handy access to command line functionality in the bottom pane.

Sadly I have to keep my Windows partition around for Lotus Notes, but for not much longer. The next release of Lotus Notes will provide support for Ubuntu, and is due out around the middle of this year. Only a few more months until I can completely blow away my Windows partition!

My hard disk drive for my laptop died, so I replaced it with a Samsung 40Gb 5400rpm IDE HDD for $80. I also had a 30Gb IBM HDD lying around with Windows XP on it. So I decided to go about setting up a system where I can dual-boot Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux.

My laptop is an old Toshiba Satellite Pro 6100. It has a swap bay where you can pull out the DVD/CD bay and replace it with a second HDD bay or with a second battery. My setup will have Ubuntu Linux on the internal drive, and Windows XP on the removable swap bay drive.

I first replaced the dead drive with the new Samsung drive. Then I installed the Ubuntu Dapper Live CD installer into the DVD/CD bay. The Ubuntu folks have made this a trivial task, so I won’t go into any details with the installation. Once the installation is complete, remove the DVD/CD bay, and replace it with the second HDD with Windows XP on it.

When you start up the laptop grub will automatically boot you into linux. Once you have logged into linux, open up a terminal and edit /boot/grub/menu.lst. Add the following lines at the bottom of the file, preferably after the linux entry, so that Windows XP appears as the last boot option.

title Windows XP
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

Since Windows XP is on the second HDD we need to use the disk swapping technique. This means adding the two map entries under title Windows XP. Save and exit the file.

So from now on if you need to boot into Windows XP at startup, you need to hit the ESC button when you see the grub boot loader. This will bring you to a list of boot options. You should be able to see Windows XP as the last entry in the list. Select Windows XP and hit the enter key to boot into it.

If you want to boot into Linux, then just don’t do anything when grub starts up. Grub will timeout after about 5 seconds, then continue to boot into Ubuntu Linux. This will still work if you remove the second HDD, and replace it with the DVD/CD bay.

EDIT: If the above doesn’t work, then try the following entry in your /boot/grub/menu.lst instead:

root (hd1,0)
savedefault
makeactive
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
chainloader +1

I just installed Ubuntu Dapper Drake today. I’ve been a fan of the Ubuntu linux distro ever since Hoary Hedgehog.

I was very impressed with the installation process of Ubuntu. It took literally 6 steps to install Ubuntu Dapper. The Live CD install is quite an innovation.

The only problem I had was enabling my Nvidia Geforce4 Go 420 graphics card. After installing the Nvidia driver, and restarting you’ll find you just see a blank screen with an underscore in the top left corner. To rectify this, do the following:

Use apt-get to install the Nvidia driver, and restricted modules that match your linux kernel:

sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx linux-restricted-modules-`uname -r`

Make a backup of your xorg.conf file:

sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf_backup

Enable the driver:

sudo nvidia-xconfig

Now if you have an Nvidia Geforce4 420 Go vidio card, then proceed with the following:

sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/options

Add the following option to the end of the file. Use CTRL+O and CTRL+X to save and exit.

options nvidia NVreg_SoftEDIDs=0 NVreg_Mobile=1

Edit your xorg.conf file:

sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Add the following options to the “Section Screen”:

Option "ExactModeTimingsDVI" "TRUE"
Option “ModeValidation” “DFP-0: NoEdidDFPMaxSizeCheck, NoVesaModes”

Then logout, and restart your xserver by holding down CTRL+ALT+Backspace. You should now have a crisper looking Dapper courtesy of your Nvidia graphics card. For further help, check out this site.

Now if you want to test out your Nvidia graphics card, then I suggest you check out XGL for some cool eye candy. I haven’t done this yet, but will certainly have a look at it sometime soon.

The other thing worth installing is Automatix. Automatix is “a graphical interface for automating the installation of the most commonly requested applications in Ubuntu linux”. It allows you to install all plugins for firefox, a dvd ripper, skype, dvd codecs… you get the picture. Removing Automatix and all the packages it installs has to be done manually. Check out this posting for removing most of the packages manually.

You should now have one kickass linux setup.