So I installed Cairo Dock. Cairo-Dock is an animated application launch bar for the desktop, comparable to the dock in Mac OS X or Rocket Dock (for Windows). I trimmed out the task tray (still want to use my panel at the moment. But I added a few of the things I use frequently and of course Second Life was added as well. I just wanted to get things off my desktop as far as the icons. Want to add this to your machine? Read on!

I know people will say go through the Software Sources section or edit /etc/apt/sources.list which is done by:

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

or

sudo kate /etc/apt/sources.list

Either way you add the following repository:

deb http://repository.cairo-dock.org/ubuntu jaunty cairo-dock

This repository needs an authentication key so run:

wget -q http://repository.cairo-dock.org/cairo-dock.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -

Then, to install Cairo-Dock, issue these two commands in the terminal:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cairo-dock cairo-dock-plug-ins

The Cairo Dock will be under System on the KDE Applications menu. Not sure what it is under Gnome. I ran the Non OpenGL one and it’s really smooth under KDE.

After I did the install updates came in for the linux kernel.  So I ran the updates and then had to reboot. This is the only thing I really need to reboot for as far as updates. Suck it Windows! I can’t count how many times I have woken up to my desktop with windows I had left open overnight that were closed because of the autoupdate rebooting my machine.

I installed Inkscape and Gimp. I really need to sit and play with those more. I didn’t install Pixel so I could concentrate on these programs somewhat.

So now I am looking over things I need to get re-installed since the complete KDE install. I need the following things which have slipped my mind:

• SSH
• VLC
• Skype
• Audacity
• LiVES
• Some more Games (like Majhong (sp?) and some of the KDE games)
• Import pictures and other things from External HD

So my little list is still a bit large but I think it will be quick and easy to do for tomorrow’s posting. I think I will start documenting some How-To’s but I will probably open up VooDooStevie.NET to do that. We’ll see. I have a Joomla install going on there with really nothing on it. Maybe I will make it a one stop thing with a bunch of different things on one site. Wheee!

One thing I didn’t mention is that in order to get the updates for the wireless, I actually had to create a network connection in the system settings area to get it going, but it  a real simple thing to get going.

This is a run down of what I did today and a little explanation of some things as well.

After installing Kubuntu I was really impressed with how far it has come since I last used it (but that was over a decade ago so a big duh on my part). The one thing I noticed off the bat is the way it handles the extra appearance stuff. It’s all native. Gnome needs Compiz installed to set up the extra things (like the cubes) and Screenlets installed for the Widgets.

KDE has all that stuff built in with Qt4 it seems. As you saw in the little gallery I had the cube going on. In case you missed it in that last post, I put it here on the left.

One thing I found is that it’s real easy to set up. Make your desktop have 4 desktops and check the cube. Yeah not much different. But you can name the desktops something other than Desktop 1, Desktop 2, etc.

I left them the default because I couldn’t think of anything to put in for now. But the fluidity of this is a lot smoother than it was under Gnome.

Ok enough talk about the extra effects, I am here to state what I had installed on the machine. Of course there is the necessities:

1. Firefox 3.0 (For now. I am going to see about installing the latest one from scratch later) but I also needed the following extensions for my personal browsing right away:
   • StumbleUpon
   • DownThemAll
   • Gmail Manager
2. gPodder – Runs perfect after install. Downloaded my subscriptions flawlessly from gPodder.com I love that little feature and it’s great when you have to reinstall or going to a new machine. You can also do the OPML file method, but this is off site which means if you don’t have your external media (CD, HD, whatever) you can access it over the internet.
3. All the dependencies for gPodder (Python libraries, ID3 libraries, OGG Tools, and Mplayer all needed to be installed for gPodder addons to work).
4. dvd::rip – yes I needed this back for sure. Which of course knowing what I needed for this to work right:
   • Kubuntu restricted extras
   • Kaffeine,
   • DVD libraries for reading encrypted DVD’s.
5. Weather widget for my desktop
6. Adobe Air
7. Tweetdeck

I also poked around and decided that I would like a few more things for software installed:

1. Second Life – installed from GetDEB then updated from Second Life’s website.
2. Super Maryo Chronicles – Installed from SMC repository
3. Extra Screen savers – This is odd that KDE came with Blank screen only. So I added the extras through good ol’ apt-get.

Seeing I want to use Firefox as the default instead of Konqueror I had to make a few changes so that could happen. In the System Settings area there is a place you can set Default Applications and that seems to work perfect. But there is also a command that you should run in terminal that will make it completely the default:

sudo update-alternatives --config x-www-browser

After putting in the root password you get the choice. And voila!

The one thing I like is how you can put the icons on the desktop and I am contemplating removing the desktop folder widget. Also how things appear in the bottom bar. I will customize this more soon I am sure, but the default layout is good enough.

I am not going to put Conky on here. It’s not really needed. I just need to adjust to how KDE handles things and the Software administration is kind of clunky in the regards to if you need things installed as dependencies it doesn’t prompt you to install them. So most of my administration of programs has been handled by command line. Go me.

I may play with layout some more later. But for now this is what it is. Shows information I personally need to know about my machine. And of course what the time is. I think I should put the clock back on the panel because most of the work I do covers up the desktop and I always have to minimize to see what time it is.

I imported pictures off a SD Card for our digital camera using F-Spot. It worked flawlessly. It was really easy and this shows that the card reader also works on the laptop under Linux. Wheeee! Now I have the pictures that Sarah this past month on my machine. That’s about 400 pictures. Seriously. We have taken over 8GB of pictures of Emma in the past year and a half almost. Think we’re obsessed with our child? Got a problem? Fuck you.

I took pictures of the labels I added onto the machine. As you see they look awsome! I trimmed the picture of Tux to remove the shadow that was in the original because it would look nasty with the white and gray shade that was in it. And yes I put a VooDooRadio logo sticker on my laptop. What’s it too ya! People will ask me about it if they see it and that promotes my show… Kinda… Sorta… Leave me alone!

During the last update, Ubuntu had released a version of Firefox called Shiretoko. It’s Firefox v.3.5 but looking up info on it. It’s a Beta of the browser. All I have to say is that Shiretoko is a little slo-mo. It locked up while uploading the pictures you see here. But also the original files are 3MB average each. But still. It runs a little ragged.

So we are nearing the end of the 30 Days point. Where do we go from here? I think I may continue to blog about running under Linux but we’ll see. Still missing some of the games I played under Windows and watching Netflix. But maybe I will load the games on the desktop and hope it will work ok.

I got this setup from the Ubuntu Blog website which it was very helpful, but seeing how I am wireless more I needed more variables to add to my setup. And this information was easily obtainable from Conky’s Sourceforge site more specifically the variable section.

The one thing I have been finding out about conky is that is is very tedious to really set it up. There is no “user friendly” GUI to configure it like the Screenlets so you have to do a lot of text editing to get it to work right. And you have to really ignore word wrap.

Another little thing about conky is when you make changes you can kill the process (I use top in the terminal to kill it) and restart it, reboot the machine, or log out of your Gnome session. I have used all three and logging out seems to be a little quicker than the other two. Go fig.

Also I learned that gPodder has an option to skip podcasts when syncing them to your iPod. So the Ubuntu Podcast has been set to that because of the file format issue with the iPod.  You can also set up an autodelte ever 30 days or whatever you want. I prefer to manually do it, but that’s just me. Also you can save the files somewhere else if you please. This is  a nice option because some shows I like to archive or edit to get bits for my show (ala “This is Why we’re Fat” from Nobody Likes Onions being inserted into my show).

I have been shutting down the machine lately so I don’t log in from work too much. But I still think I got some things done in the short time I did them.

I added some stickers to the inside area where you usually have your Intel Inside and Windows stickers. I also HAD to add a VooDooRadio related sticker onto my machine so that is on here as well.

I also added a tux sticker to cover up the Acer logo on the front of the machine.

Basically I found the images I wanted, printed them out on the color laser we have at work and one of my co-workers added the adhesive and also laminated one side for me. Read on to see the images that I Have on here now.

Below is the images I added to the machine. I will take pics later.

Other than the external I decided to play with the Compiz manager and I got my machine to do that really nifty cube thing and a few other nifty effects on the desktop. Here’s a couple screenshots of it in the gallery above.

I watched ITRadio on the live stream and it was running decent aside from the slight skipping because of the wireless connection, but I managed to overcome throwing my machine out the window because of it.

I didn’t do too too much because it was my birthday. I actually removed a few programs that didn’t work too well on the machine (mainly some games) but aside from that everything is still running swell.

I hope to work on a podcast soon. It’s been a few weeks since I last put one out. I haven’t even hooked up the mixer to this machine to see if it can work with Audacity properly. Oh well something to set my sights on I guess.

I basically watched TV last night and had my birthday cake and opened presents from Sarah and Emma. I got 2 iPod cases (1 hard the other is one of the soft rubber ones) some pants and some T-shirts which I needed badly. Emma signed the card and brought me the big bag that the presents were in. My sister and her kids stopped by and gave me cards and a little VW Bug car that Emma loves to play with now.

I will have more things that I have done on the machine tomorrow because I barely spent time doing anything on this day.

The issue I had with ripping movies in the past is the sound didn’t sync with the video. It was like watching an old Kung Fu movie but more annoying for the audio. You”d hear a bang and then see it 5 seconds later. Not good.

I looked around for some more games to play. I downloaded a RTS game called Warzone 2100. Here’s a blip from the developer:

Warzone 2100 is a real-time strategy game, originally developed by Pumpkin Studios and published by Eidos Interactive, now developed by the Warzone 2100 Project. Compared to other real-time strategy games, it has a greater focus on artillery, radar, and counter-battery technologies, more frequent in-game cinematic updates as game play progresses, a massive research tree, as well as a vehicle design system.

Now the only way to install this under Linux is to compile it so I have to do that… Later.

There is a windows based client so I can play with you Windows folks if you wanna.

So not too much done today, I had to look at a co-worker’s home computer for him. They were getting a lot of poor performance on their machine. Hrm WinXP and only 512MB of Ram?! BAD!

I post these the day after I do them. In other words, all this that I am posting here on Thursday was actually done on Wednesday. In case you hadn’t figured it all out yet.  Oh and today (Thursday 8/13) is my birthday. I don’t know what I will be able to do when I get out of work so Day 14 will be real short.

Well… Perfect in the sense that it showed things and did things, but it was S…L…O…W as molasses because our network is a little on the laggy side.

So to announce I was able to connect from work to the home machine, I sent out a tweet using Gwibber. Of course my friend Graeme (of ITRadio fame) had to make a snarky reply.

Through there I was able to install a few things. I am trying to get my music sorted a little so I looked up a few possibilities to do so. People were saying that Cowbell was a program that aided in the sorting of your digital library so I installed that.

It was not quite what I had hoped it to be. It was basically a tag editor ONLY and did not sort your music files what-so-ever.

Rhythmbox also does not sort out the files into a nice Artist – Album manner so I did some more hunting around. Then it dawned on me. SONGBIRD! I had tried this out under windows before, it was decent, but people were calling it the iTunes killer app. Well, it’s not quite there yet. Yes it is a killer when it comes to functionality, resources,  and the add-ons. But it doesn’t have the podcast functionality iTunes has so a lot of people that listen to podcasts will be still drawn to iTunes, in my opinion.

So I installed Songbird. It imported all my media and it also sorted the files into the directory structure I mentioned earlier. So it works perfectly. Goodbye Banshee and Cowbell. Rhythmbox, you will be used for ripping audio CD’s  (another feature Songbird lacks). gPodder, you are definitely my podcast downloading and syncing solution.

After all this I played a little more in Second Life and called it a day.

I downloaded a game called PlaneShift which is a free MMORPG. Not as good as Rapellz… Man I am missing that game. I should just install it on the Windows machine to play it. But I digress…

I said I wanted to Rip and Burn DVD’s as one of my points of usage for a computer, so I played with that. However I ran into some issues.

Stupid me forgot to get the package to read encrypted DVD’s (which is basically EVERY movie DVD out there) so I had to install it. If you are trying to watch movies, do this:

I completely backed up all my important Windows based things (in case I return to windows) and all my important documents (podcasts, itunes settings, pictures, and other stuff) onto my external harddrive.

Took a DEEP breath and put the installation CD into my CD drive and rebooted the machine.

The setup process is pretty cut and dry. Choose language and locations,  input name, choose username, choose a strong password, partition the hard drive… Okay this is where I REALLY took a deep breath because I told it to use the ENTIRE DISK! Sit back as it erases and formats all of the hard drive and installs the OS.

After it was done installing I rebooted the machine. Automatically wireless connection works! And now to download all the updates since I burned the install CD (186 updates to perform). After that I had to reboot again so the new kernel will take place.

Once I was back up I installed the Flash Player, VLC, Ubuntu restricted extras then I installed Boxee (reported they had Netflix Playback, dunno as of yet, need to play with it).

I then setup Pidgin for instant messaging. I miss Digsby, but I have used Pidgin before under windows. I can’t wait for Digsby to have a Linux version. HURRY GUYS!!!!

Next, I installed Amarok and Syncropated! to see if that will get the iPod podcasting need situated. Apparently Amarok discontinued podcast features in the latest version.

This sucks, its a decent player so I will keep it for other things I guess.

I then installed gPodder. With gPodder, I resubscribed to all my old podcasts that were under windows.. Now to wait for them to download..  Zzz… Okay I can’t sit doing nothing, so I moved on while it downloaded them.

I uninstalled Sycropated! It didn’t work at all. Some of my resources that I found on Google mentioned using it, but I guess it was for the older iPods and not the Widescreen Nano I have currently.

I downloaded Adobe Air to install so I could get Tweetdeck back. After installing Air I got Tweetdeck installed and tweeting is back for me. Yay!

I installed Wine but I have not toyed with it yet. Wine is supposedly useful incase you need to run a Windows based application. But I don’t know if I will be playing with it just yet. Trying to seperate myself from the Microsoft OS Crutch.

Lastly I changed my desktop image to something personalized. Didn’t feel like staring at the brown themed desktop that is the default one. After this I decided it really was time for bed. I started this at 7:30 PM but I feel I got a lot done during this time. More to do tomorrow.