Colin Harrington

After setting up a laptop with Ubuntu, one of the things that I typically like to do is add a the CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor applet (cpufreq-applet) to my main Gnome panel.

I typically work running large web applications (Grails…) that typically use a lot of CPU power when running tests, launching the apps or refactorings within an IDE.  I like the ability to quickly adjust the CPU ‘govenor’ which governs how the CPU is utilized from a power/performance perspective (see CPU Frequency Scaling in Linux for more).

Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) uses Gnome 2.28.1 which requires authorization to change the CPU Frequency (which makes sense).  Earlier versions did not require this authorization since it is new in Gnome 2.28.

With policykit-1 (also new in Ubuntu 9.10) you can grant yourself authorization for the cpufreq-applet based on a user or group by creating a policy file (at /var/lib/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/org.gnome.cpufreqselector.pkla for example) that looks something like this:
[org.gnome.cpufreqselector]
Identity=unix-user:YourUser
Action=org.gnome.cpufreqselector
ResultAny=no
ResultInactive=no
ResultActive=yes

Thanks to this post/discussion for pointing this out   be sure you change YourUser to your username or group that you wish to have authorized.

I don’t know of a policy GUI that works with policykit-1 yet, so let me know if you find something.

I also replaced the icons in the /usr/share/pixmaps/cpufreq-applet/ with something I found on  gnome-look.org

Hulu Desktop (currently Beta) is now available on Linux!  A friend tipped me off to an article on TechCrunch about it. 

Downloading it and setting it up was pretty easy.  I went to Hulu Desktop and selected download for linux.  From there It gave me choices for Fedora and Ubuntu (both 32 & 64bit versions!)  Since I run Ubuntu I downloaded and installed the deb – easy enough.

When you first launch it it asks you to accept the EULA.

The first time I launched Hulu Desktop I got an error, that "Hulu Desktop could not locate the Flash plugin.  If you do not have it installed, please modify ~/.huludesktop with the correct location of libflashplayer.so." (remember the beta sticker?)

I had to edit the ~/.huludesktop file to use the wrapped version of the Flash plugin /var/lib/flashplugin-installer/npwrapper.libflashplayer.so and it worked like a charm!

Playback worked great, probably better than the in-browser experience.  The interface is slick, better than the web-interface and more along the lines of Boxee.  Fullscreen worked well for me.

Props to Hulu for providing a Linux version.  The Linux desktop is a first class citizen.  Skype has a Beta version that rocks on Linux.  Google Chrome, Firefox, etc. Who is next? Adobe?  CS5?  I’d pay for Adobe CS5 on Linux.

So far its been pretty good stuff for Beta Software!  I’ll definitely be using Hulu more now. 

Here is a shot of the opening screen:

And another of the Menu (while watching media):

I recently installed Ubuntu 9.04(Jaunty Jackalope) on a 17" Macbook pro and as a part of that process, I had to install a bootloader called rEFIt.  You could think of EFI is just a next-gen BIOS.

Even though the bootloader looks decent, I don’t like the look of silver/grey color, so I decided to customize it.  The process to customize rEFIt was relatively straight forward and the result is beautiful.

This is what I came up with:

This is what it looks like with a Windows Partition:

I love the simplicity of it!!

Here is a closeup of the icons / OS Choices:

I don’t really know where the icons came from, but they look tasty  On Linux there is a decent package for working with mac icons (.icns) or sudo apt-get install icnsutils  which will get you some useful tools (png2icns and icns2png)

I did have to make a few modifications to the Tux icon [os_linux.icns] to give him a ‘glow’ so that he doesn’t fade into the black on black:

This windows Icon [os_win.icns] is the stock version I think (send me a link to the author if you know):

I did add a slight ‘glow’ to the apple icon [os_mac.icns] (send me a link to the author if you know):

I tried a number of custom ’selected’ themes but gradients didn’t look right, so I went with the simple plan.  The selection bitmap can be found here:

the process is simple once rEFIt is installed:  modify the refit.conf with the icons in place, and you are done!

Here is what I came up with for my refit.conf (comments removed):

timeout 5
banner hostname.bmp
selection_big   selection-big-ring.bmp
hideui tools shell funcs hdbadges label
legacyfirst

The original comments in the refit.conf file are helpful!  Its straight forward if you can read

• timeout = the number of seconds before it automatically chooses for you
• banner = the bitmap of the upper part of the screen (top left pixel = background color)
• selection_big = the grey ‘ring’ that indicated the selection
• hideui = Hide elements of rEFIt so we can get a clean interface
• legacyfirst = Legacy OS first (Linux)

Use at your own risk!!

If I had the time, it would be fun to build/enhance rEFIt to have an all-black fill instead of the grey/silver.

I’ve had a good experience with Ubuntu 9.04 on a 17" Macbook Pro, and I’ll Blog about it – and see what I can do to help update the documentation – look for an upcoming post.

My experience in upgrading Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon to Hardy Heron was a fairly smooth one.  It was a straight forward process, The System Updater told me that there was a distribution upgrade.  I followed the assigned steps and shortly had upgraded my whole system.  The status bar was horribly in-accurate, changing from 4 minutes all the way to 54 minutes and back again in the matter of 30 seconds, but it was nothing that I haven’t seen on other operating systems. 

The Installer maintained all of my current customizations (since they are in my home directory ~/ ).  I was surprised to see that even my Compiz settings were all exactly how I had left them.  I was happy that the Installer asked me what to do with merge conflicts in my /etc files, (samba.conf, php.ini, apache2.conf, etc.).  There were only a few things that I had to tidy up

• Configuring the Launch Size of my Terminal window (Ubuntu Forums)
• blacklisting the pcspkr kernel module (by adding the line "blacklist pcspkr" to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist – see ubuntuforums for more discussion)

I can now reliably use the standby functionality.  I have a dual Monitor setup and it works well. 

Is Ubuntu ready for mom?  no, but its definitely on the right course!  In my opinion, ubuntu is ready for the little brother, and the wife of a geek.  It doesn’t test the Mom test, nor the Grandma test yet. 

*Update* After a few months of using Hardy Heron, I have realized that Linux is my primary OS.  I’ve taken the jump – its working out great. I still have some things that I would like to see ironed out a bit more, but its worth much more than I paid for it!!

It had been a while since I re-imaged. I finally got a chance to buy a larger hard drive for my laptop.  I was suprised on how easy it was to get NTFS rw support with linux using NTFS-3G.  I decided a while ago to give Windows and Linux each their own partitions along with a shared Data Drive now in NTFS.

So the Partition Table looks like this: 

$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 200.0 GB, 200049647616 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 24321 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x2d24c9d9

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1        6266    50331613+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2            6267       15150    71360730    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3           15151       23942    70621740   83  Linux
/dev/sda4           23943       24321     3044317+   5  Extended
/dev/sda5           23943       24321     3044286   82  Linux swap / Solaris

 Here is a good article about setting up NTFS Support in Ubuntu.  Linux is getting better every Day.