Are You Getting Sick Of Microsoft Windows? It’s Time To Give Ubuntu Linux A Whirl
By Alan Oliver

About 18 months ago, I had another disastrous crash on my PC that caused me to lose a host of photos, music and documents. Luckily I had a backup of most of my documents on an external disk. So I wasn’t too concerned by this. I had experienced many crashes on Windows before and usually I was able to recover most of my documents and restore the system back to normal without too much effort.

This time was different however and to my horror, I discovered that Windows had somehow corrupted my external disk as well. I had lost everything and was pretty angry about it.

I tried a number of data recovery programs but most of the files wore gone. Forever. What a disaster! At that point I decided that I would look for another alternative to windows and I thought I would give Linux another try.

A few years earlier I had experimented with RedHat Linux but had no real success with it as it had problems detecting my usb keyboard and mouse. Which was obviously a bit of a non-starter for me. I knew that big advances were being made in the Linux world so I decided to do a bit of research.

Linux is an operating system that is free. That is, it can be downloaded and copied and distributed without a fee. It is free in a deeper sense too. Most of the software is written under a license called the “GPL” which effectively means that source code is available to everyone for each and every component of the Linux Operating System. If you have access to the source code for a piece of software then you can change the program to fix bugs and make it better. Once you do this you are under obligation to make your new source code available to others.
This has worked extremely well and Linux is being developed by programmers all over the world to make it better and better. The progress is amazing!

In my research I discovered a website: distrowatch.com. This website keeps a list of the most popular distributions of Linux. A distribution is a collection of Linux software that together makes an operating system. Each distribution contains different software and has a different focus. There are so many to try… Fedora, Mandrake, Puppy, PCLinuxOS, Debian, Knoppix, and the most popular, Ubuntu Linux.

I downloaded the ISO of Ubuntu Linux from the Ubuntu website http://www.ubuntu.com/ and burned it to cd (an ISO file is cd image that can be recreated using a cd burning tool such as Nero). I placed the cd in my drive and booted up my computer.

I was astounded!

Within 10 minutes my computer was running Ubuntu Linux without even having to install it! This was a “Live-CD” and it can be used without installing to hard disk – it can be run from a cd without affecting your computer at all.

All my hardware was detected and within minutes I was surfing the web using Firefox and getting my email using Evolution, chatting to friends in messenger and yahoo chat using Gaim, writing documents and opening spreadsheets in Open Office and listening to Internet Radio with RythmBox.

I was delighted with the easy to use and gorgeous looking desktop. I decided to install it straight away and since then I haven’t looked back.

There is an abundance of free open source software just waiting for you to experience. The package management system – Synaptic, allows you to search repositories of software and download them. The quality of a lot of the software is incredible.

Linux is written from the ground up to be a secure operating system. This means that you won’t have to worry about getting viruses, spyware or any other kind of malware. My system is as stable as a rock.
Of course, there are downsides to running Linux. The main one is that there is a learning curve that can be quite steep. It is not windows so If you are trying to get something working, your windows knowledge will not help you.
You might need to troubleshoot problems using the Command Line Interface – similar to windows DOS, but many times more powerful.

Fortunately, help is at hand on the incredibly friendly and helpful forums at ubuntuforums.org
I have been running Ubuntu Linux now for 18 months and can’t see any reason now to return to windows. Once you get past the mind set of using closed source software a whole new world opens up before you and you realise that amazing things are possible with linux.

I hope you found this article helpful and I hope it inspires you to try out Ubuntu Linux as I did. You won’t regret trying it.

Here are some resources:

distrowatch.com

Distrowatch – News on the latest Linux distributions.

ubuntu.com

Ubuntu – Download the Ubuntu Linux operating system for your computer

ubuntuforums.com

Ubuntu Forums – Go here for help and advice

wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux

Linux on Wikipedia

order linux on cd from frogshape!

http://www.frogshape.com

Getting Started With Ubuntu – How To Connect To The Internet And Do Common Window Tasks
By David Babble

Download the latest version of Ubuntu from their official site and burn the downloaded ISO file to a blank CD. Any good CD burning software should be able to handle writing ISO files to a disc.

When the CD finishes remove it and put it back into the drive so it auto plays and followed the instructions to boot into the Live CD. Live CD allows you to temporarily run Ubuntu and most of its features without doing anything to your installation of Windows. This is a good chance to see if you really like what Ubuntu has to offer before really committing.

After playing around in Ubuntu’s environment for a bit you’ll notice an examples folder on the desktop that has various types of files that can be opened using Ubuntu’s default programs installed. For example, Ubuntu will use Open Office (a free alternative to Microsoft Office) to open DOC files.

Connecting to the Internet in Ubuntu

There was no obvious signs of how to connect to the Internet. After looking around the help pages built into the operating system you’ll notice that connecting to the Internet is pretty simple, unless you have a USB ADSL modem. Being on an Orange broadband basic package means a USB ADSL modem has to be used unless you own a router separately.

Being on the basic package means connecting to the Internet using a USB modem, not an Ethernet Live box that Orange provides on the upgraded package. So rebooting the computer and finding a web page came up with the instructions to extract some firmware, write a boot script etc. just to get the modem to connect.

After completing the modem installation in the Ubuntu’s Live CD environment you’ll be prompted to restart Ubuntu to get started. Restarting Ubuntu whilst using Live CD will just restart into Windows, so that’s no good!

There had to be another answer. At this point I got fed up and went back to Windows. A few months later I plucked up the courage to try Ubuntu again but the Internet connection issue was still stick in my mind. So I searched around on Google more and searched the Ubuntu Forums. This is when I came across some luck. I found a thread in a forum thread where a guy made a USB ADSL modem manager program!

Was this going to end the problem? I thought. So after checking out the USB Modem Manager site and then following the link to the latest version, I downloaded the Debian file for it, .DEB. First thought was, being used to Windows, what the hell do I do with a Debian file? Is it a Ubuntu version of a Windows zip file or what?

I double clicked the Debian file downloaded to my desktop and voilà, it started to install the modem manager, great, must be just Ubuntu’s version of a windows .EXE file. The program prompted me to unplug and plug my modem back in and it still didn’t work. So after a couple of times of re-extracting the firmware, disconnecting and reconnecting using the options in the manager, the progress bar for the Internet connection located in the top right went fully green, it must’ve worked.

I opened Firefox, typed in a URL and hey presto, the Internet worked. Fortunately, this USB modem manager doesn’t require a restart so it’s possible to run and test the Internet while using the Live CD, which I highly recommend doing.

Taking the Plunge with Ubuntu

With this caveat fixed, I took the plunge, backed up all my files onto an external hard drive and fully installed Ubuntu over Windows.

After trying it for just over 24 hours I became convinced that this was an operating system that I would be using for the long term. I can copy large amounts of files from one hard drive to the other without my PC noticeably slowing or making music stutter, file transfers are seamless whilst doing other tasks.

I tried opening a video file and Ubuntu complained that it couldn’t play that type of file, but it promptly came up with a message telling me I can download the required files to get it to work, so a click of the OK button and it was fixed. I tried playing an MP3 and the same happened, just a click of a message and Ubuntu located and installed the required files to play my music. These files need to be downloaded separately due to propriety issues.

A few things take a while to get used to, such as the folder views it has and the prompts that come up occasionally requesting your password to be entered. This might seem odd to have to enter a password just to change the date/time. With Windows latest operating system, Vista, prompting for requests on more admin type tasks, the odd one or two from Ubuntu are manageable.

Playing Video Games and other Windows Software in Ubuntu

I don’t play games much and haven’t attempted to do so yet, but I’ll try WINE sometime and see if that works. WINE is a program to let you play Windows only software in Ubuntu. Could come in handy for Photoshop since the free equivalent, GIMP, just doesn’t cut it for some things I want to do, such as batch image processing.

Ubuntu is a flavour of Linux that is becoming a popular, free alternative to Windows. To get started, go to the Ubuntu site.

Conclusion

Hopefully this guide will help the average computer user out there decide whether they really want to take the plunge with a different, but free operating system. In summary, if you’re prepared to spend a few hours to get used to it and to get it working the way you want, go for it!

http://launchpad.net/usb-adsl-modem-manager – USB ADSL Modem Manager for Ubuntu

http://www.babblestorm.co.uk/search.php?search=ubuntu – Ubuntu related news

Debian Chinese How-To
By Yien Bin

This is my personal experience with chinese environment setup on my Debian Box, with KDE desktop.

Here is my specs.

• Debian Unstable, kernel 2.6.18-1-686
• xserver-xorg 7.1.0-4
• kde 3.5.5

Setting your system with english locales, so that your desktop, menus and programs’ file menus won’t show english characters in blurry chinese ttf fonts. You will still have the ability to input chinese in almost everything(browsers, konquerer, instant messengers, konsole, xchat and more).
Here is a step by step instruction.

1. Setting UTF-8 Locale system wide
   

   dpkg-reconfigure locales

   This command will prompt you a screen to select your desired locales. For my case, I have selected

   1. en_US ISO-8859-1
   2. en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
   3. zh_CN GB2312
   4. zh_CN.GB18030 GB18030
   5. zh_CN.GB18030 GB18030
   6. zh_CN.GB18030 GB18030
   7. zh_TW BIG5
   8. zh_TW.UTF-8 UTF-8

   Set en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8 as default locales. By now, when you output your locales settings with locale command, all the variables with “LC_XXX” shoud be already in “en_US.UTF-8“.

   

2. Displaying Chinese

   There are a few packages you need to get in order to get chinese text displayed correctly in your KDE desktop.
   These are for KDE Internationalization.

   • kde-i18n-zhcn (for Simplified Chinese)
   • kde-i18n-zhtw (for Big5 Chinese)

   You can always add your desired encoding for other languages. I have also kde-i18n-ko for korean, and kde-i18n-ja for Japan.
   After installing the internationalized packages, you will have to install TTF(true type fonts). Here’s the list.

   • ttf-arphic-bkai00mp (“AR PL KaitiM Big5″ Chinese TrueType font)
   • ttf-arphic-bsmi00lp (“AR PL Mingti2L Big5″ Chinese TrueType font)
   • ttf-arphic-gbsn00lp (“AR PL SungtiL GB” Chinese TrueType font)
   • ttf-arphic-gkai00mp (“AR PL KaitiM GB” Chinese TrueType font)
   • ttf-arphic-uming (“AR PL ShanHeiSun Uni” Chinese Unicode TrueType font)
   • ttf-fireflysung (“AR PL New Sung” Chinese TrueType font)
   • ttf-kochi-gothic-naga10 (Kochi Subst Gothic Japanese TrueType font)

   My default chinese font is ttf-fireflysung which I’ve forgot where to get. I remember getting it from a Taiwan site, if any of you have the address, please kindly let me know. If you are unable to get firefly, uming is probably your best choice for chinese text.

3. Changing font for chinese text display

   Sometimes in your KDE desktop, if you have downloaded files with chinese/japanese file names, it will be displayed in square unreadable characters. This means KDE is unable to find appropriate font substitution for unknown characters. You can get qt3-qtconfig to deal with this problem. Inside the program you will get to set font substitution for your default KDE font(mine is Bitstream Vera). Apply several substitution TTFs like AR PL New Sung and AR PL ShanHeiSun Uni, so your text will be displayed correctly.

   For other programs like Firefox, Xchat, amarok and more. You will get to choose their own default font. For my case, once qt3-qtconfig is set properly, these programs have no problem using the settings.

   If above methods still do not work out for you. You can try also install gtk2-engines-gtk-qt. This program will use your Qt settings to draw your GTK applications’ user interface, including the fonts of course. You should also check with

   update-alternatives –config qtconfig

   to see whether which qt config is currently in use. If you have used qt3-qtconfig, you definitely should choose “/usr/bin/qtconfig-qt3″ as your default.

4. Chinese Input Method

   IMO, scim is always the best choice because it has pinyin support, the only chinese input method I’m familiar with. You will have to get these packages.

   • scim
   • scim-chinese
   • scim-gtk2-immodule
   • scim-modules-socket
   • scim-pinyin
   • libscim8c2a

   In order to get scim to work in almost everywhere in KDE, some settings need to be done.
   First, in your ~/.bashrc file, add in this line.

   export LC_CTYPE=”zh_CN.UTF-8″

   This will export your LC_TYPE as zh_CN.UTF-8 since we have already set all these to en_US.UTF-8. This is per user’s local setting, for my case I’ve set my LC_TYPE to zh_CN.UTF-8 system wide, with this command.

   dpkg-reconfigure localesconf

   Use this command to set scim as your default input method for X.

   update-alternatives –config xinput-all_ALL

   Again this is my system wide setting. For user’s local setting, add these lines in your ~/.bashrc

   export XIM=SCIM
   export XIM_PROGRAM=/usr/bin/scim
   export XIM_ARGS=”-d”
   export GTK_IM_MODULE=xim
   export QT_IM_MODULE=xim

   Restart your X-server, and login to KDE. In any text input field(Gaim, Firefox, Xchat, Open Office, Thunderbird and more), when you hit CTRL+Space, the scim toolbar will pop up and you are able to input chinese text. CTRL+Space again to switch back to English.

   Remember not to install the Skim(KDE frontend for scim), as it will somehow freeze your keyboard frequently.

A very useful page at http://www.unifont.org/fontguide/, you might want to check it out.

Yien Bin is a part-time tech blogger. Debian is his favorite operating system. His blog can be found at http://www.nixser.com