Fixing GRUB

Installing Ubuntu on various computers has not been a problematic experience for me in the past, so when I re-installed an old Asus eee900 which had been collecting dust for a while, I was suprised when it would not boot after the installation had completed. Figuring something had gone awry, I thought I'd boot it with the USB stick and see if that got me any further. Selecting the USB stick as primary boot option, I was surprised when the boot menu of the USB stick did not show up and the computer booted instead. Unplugging the USB stick and rebooting got me into the same issues, which led me to believe that GRUB was having some issues.

After some Googling, I found the Boot Repair tool, and after running that, booting worked as it should, without the USB stick.

Changing network interface name

I recently found myself interested in installing MatLab on my laptop, as my university has acquired licences for students to use. It turns out that to activate MatLab on Linux, there has to be a network interface named eth0 on the machine. Unfortunately, my Ubuntu installation had given the wired network interface the name of p3p1, and this made activating my MatLab licence a hassle, as explained by KB1-661QJD.
As the KB article explains, editing /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules and renaming the name of the wired ethernet interface should solve the problem, but in my case, there was only a single interface in the file; wlan0.

The solution, I found, was to add a new entry to the file for the wired ethernet interface. I did so by copying the existing wlan0 entry and changing ATTR{address}, KERNEL and NAME values to appropriate values for the wired ethernet interface. The ATTR{address} is of course the hardware address of the interface, and may be found by running ifconfig | grep HW.

Installing Oracle JDK 7 in Ubuntu

Despite the latest security issues with Java, I still use Java as a development platform. The easiest way to install Java in Ubuntu I have found is by adding a custom repository, and webupd8's repository has served me well.

The step-by-step guide for adding Java JDK7 to Ubuntu is as follows:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install oracle-java7-installer

LaTeX editor

I have started using the LaTeX-editor TeXMaker to write reports for university assignments. In addition to that editor, additional software is required to make it work. For Windows, there is MiKTex, and for Linux there is TeXLive.

Removing LibreOffice from Ubuntu 11.10

As I have gone away from using locally installed Office programs, and rather rely on a mixture of Google Docs and LaTeX for my Office-related needs, I have no need to have LibreOffice installed on my computers any more.

As I have also recently upgraded my laptop with an SSD and subsequently gone away from Windows 7 to Ubuntu on said laptop, I found myself interested in removing LibreOffice.

The following command in terminal should get rid of it:

sudo apt-get --purge remove libreoffice-core 

Installing new AMD Drivers in Ubuntu 11.04

I recently installed Ubuntu 11.04 on my desktop and gave the restricted drivers coming with the install for my ATI card a shot, expecting them to work flawlessly. They did, in the regard that they kept the 4870X2 quiet, as opposed to the noisy default open-source drivers. They did not, however, have decent performance. Movies were choppy and moving any kind of window was an ugly sight.

Looking to remedy the situation, I looked towards AMD.com and found the newer 11.8 drivers and followed this walkthrough to update them.

I now enjoy both a quiet card and good performance.

Ubuntu Button Layout

For those used to Windows placement of the minimize, maximize and close buttons of a window, Ubuntu might prove a bit annoying to get used to, as it recently moved those to the opposite side.

It is, however, quite easy to move them to a more familiar position.

Press Alt+F2, type gconf-editor and hit Enter, expand Apps, metacity and general, and find the button_layout setting. Click its value and type the following to get to Windows placement:

menu:minimize,maximize,close

Update April 11th 2012:

In Ubuntu 11.10, to perform the same trick it's possible to copy and paste the following line into a terminal window:

gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/metacity/general/button_layout "menu:minimixe,maximize,close" 

Upgrading from Ubuntu 9.10 to 10.04

Encountered this wine-bug when upgrading Ubuntu 9.10 to Ubuntu 10.04 on one of my systems.

Took backup of important files and installed from scratch as all of the fixes I tried did not work.

Installing OS using USB Stick

I recently wanted to update an old Asus Eee 900 computer, removing the old Xandros OS and replacing it with the shinier Ubuntu 10.04 Netbook Edition.

As I do not have an external dvd-drive available, I thought I would try using USB sticks as an installation medium.

I quickly found my way to the official download, which has a simple how-to guide available as a part of the site. Alas, the simple guide turned out to be non-functioning on my Ubuntu system. When I came to the part where I press "Make Startup Disk", I was greeted with the message of "Installation of bootloader failed" or something similar to that.

One of the things I tried out was to format the USB stick, going from NTFS to Ext4 - none of which had any effect as to the error message given. I eventually turned to google for some guidance and ended up at this site. I gave the top-most script there a go, typing in the commands as used in the script, to have a look at what was going on.

The following is the script I used.


# Download your preferred DESKTOP install image (NOT alternate CD).  I used
#   kubuntu-9.10-desktop-amd64.iso

# install unetbootin - a USB stick image creator
sudo apt-get install unetbootin

# insert stick and find out what the device name is
sudo fdisk -l

# Zero out USB stick MBR (DESTRUCTIVE):
# This step may not be required
# NOTE!  Change "sdx1" below to your USB stick designation
# BE CAREFUL! Make sure you have the right device name
sudo umount /dev/sdx1         # change sdx1
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdx1 bs=512 count=1  # change sdx1

# Format the USB stick - use the right device name!
# This step may not be required
sudo mkfs.vfat /dev/sdx1  # change sdx1
sync

# Reinsert and mount the USB stick

# run unetbootin
unetbootin

# Select the Diskimage|ISO option and click the
#    "..." button to select the iso file
# Select your USB drive
# Click OK to start




This turned out to be working great, and the Asus Eee 900 is now sporting a shinier Ubuntu 10.04 Netbook Edition.

Upgrading OpenOffice in Ubuntu 9.10

I thought it would update to 3.2 automatically through apt-get (and it might - I might not have the proper repositories configured?), but as it doesn't I had to find another way.
Being new to Linux and the way of doing things, I relied upon the Google-results I would get.

I found these steps to be easy enough to follow. This post is basically just a repost of those for my own benefit so I'll find them again later.

Instead of making the three small files in the guide I found, I just entered the commands in a single terminal window, one by one, continuing as they would finish, while adding a new one (wget). I definitely see the benefit of having them as files, making it a lot easier to use on multiple systems, and updatable with newer versions. However, for a one-off thing, typing them all in a single terminal-window works just as well.

• wget http://download.services.openoffice.org/files/stable/3.2.0/OOo_3.2.0_LinuxIntel_install_en-US_deb.tar.gz
• cd Downloads
• Puts us in the /home/Downloads-folder. This is where wget puts the files downloaded unless otherwise is specified.
• sudo apt-get remove openoffice*.*
• This removes whatever OpenOffice installation installed on the system after you've entered your password.
• tar -zxvf OOo_3.2.0_LinuxIntel_install_en-US_deb.tar.gz
• This unpacks the contents of the downloaded archive and puts the files into /home/Downloads/OOo_3.2.0_LinuxIntel_install_en-US_deb. I could probably rename it to something simpler, but I haven't toyed around to do so.
• cd OOO320_m12_native_packed-1_en-US.9483/DEBS/
• Puts us in that folder.
• sudo dpkg -i *.deb
• Goes through all the .deb-packages in the folder we just cd'd into and installs the software in them.
• cd desktop-integration
• Puts us in the folder /home/OOO320_m12_native_packed-1_en-US.9483/DEBS/
• sudo dpkg -i openoffice.org.3.2-debian-menus_3.2-9472_all.deb
• Installs the package in that folder.

Feel free to suggest improvements to this process in the comments.

Disappearing NICs in Ubuntu 9.10

One of my computers I recently installed Ubuntu 9.10 on, lost its connection to the network somehow, and even though both of the NICs had flashing lights when connected, the computer would not connect to any network resource.

After some quick Googling I checked the /etc/network/interfaces and discovered the only thing configured was the loopback interface, which upon checking my laptop with Ubuntu 9.10 appears to be the default setting.

At first finding this somewhat odd, I manually added both eth0 and eth1 and set them up to use DHCP and rebooted the computer to see if this would work.

Logging back in, the network-connectivity icon (Network Manager?) still showed no signs of connection, but loading Firefox and browsing to a website confirmed the connection was working, and it has since.