so I thought I’d give Evolution (Ubuntu’s open source MS Outlook alternative) a chance.  I use Gmail to manage approximately four different email addresses, and I actually love Gmail’s way of organizing things (by tags). I also tend to access my email from different computers rather regularly, so POP mail (which downloads the mail from the server) was not feasible. That’s why I decided to go with IMAP, which basically synchs the data on your computer with that on the gmail servers (in this case). The setup is pretty straightforward:

Open up your gmail account first, and click on ‘Settings’ and then on ‘Forwarding and POP/IMAP’. Gake sure IMAP is enabled and then click on the “Configuration Instructions” link underneath that option (oh, and save your changes!). In the window which opens up (in a new tab in Firefox…) you’ll have to click on the link for “other” under the ‘mail clients’ list. The page it opens will list all the information you need.

Now, open Evolution. If it’s the first time you’ve used that, then it will prompt you to set up an account. If you’re already using Evolution, but want to add Gmail, then click on “Edit” and then on “preferences”. It should open up in the “Mail Accounts” portion of the Preferences menu, so choose “Add”.

Here’s the pertinent information (basically what that gmail page has for you):

First window (Identity):

• Full name: [your name]
• Email Address: [your full gmail address here]
• (choose to make this your default email address if you so desire)
• Reply to: [should normally be your full gmail address, unless you prefer a different address for people to respond to]
• Organization: [only fill out if you need to list your organization...]

Second window (Receiving Email):

• Server Type: IMAP
• Server: imap.gmail.com
• Use Secure Connection: SSL encryption
• Authentication Type: Password
• (unless you want to enter your password every time it connects, choose for it to remember the password)

Third window (Receiving Options):

here are the options I checked in this window:

• Check for new messages every 10 minutes
• Check for new messages in all folders
• Check for new messages in subscribed folders
• Automatically synchronize remote mail locally

Fourth Window (Sending Email):

• Server Type: SMTP
• Server: smtp.gmail.com
• (the box under it [for server requiring authentication] should be checked – make sure it is!)
• Use Secure Connection: SSL encryption
• Type: Login
• Username: [your full gmail address -> example@gmail.com]
• (tell it to remember the password…)

Last Screen:

This is just what you want to call the account in your account list – I just called mine “gmail” I believe (creative, I know – so sue me…). After clicking “Next on this screen you should be good to go. Close out “Preferences” (if that’s how you got to the new account screen).

You should be good to go. If it doesn’t prompt you for a password right away, or try to connect right away, just hit “Send/Receive” and it should try to connect and prompt you for a password.

You should notice a in your email folder section the topmost section is entitled “On This Computer”. When Evolution synchs with Gmail for the first time it will create a new section called “Gmail” with all the folders/tags you have in gmail. This is where your Gmail inbox is accessed and you control Gmail.

Since Evolution doesn’t do things exactly like gmail, some things are more “equivalent” than “equal”. You have folders instead of tags. I have filters set up in google to put tags on emails from certain addresses/services. To put a tag on something from Evolution you just drag it into the folder, which also takes it out of your inbox (note that you can’t apply an email to multiple folders, so if you want multiple tags on an email just leave it in your inbox until you can open up gmail and do it there).

Also, if you just hit “Delete” in Evolution, it doesn’t actually delete your email. Rather, it Archives it. In Gmail, that translates to removing the “inbox” tag on an email. So, if you had a filter in effect to tag an email, say for “family”, then that email will automatically be dropped in the “family” folder. But if you’re not sure if an email was tagged or not in Gmail, best thing to do is to drag it to the appropriate folder.

To actually delete an email, you need to drag the email to the ‘Trash’ folder found under the ‘[Gmail]‘ folder.

Came across this news on Ars Technica. Apparently Canonical is going to pursue somr rather dramatic changes to its notification system. A very good thing in my mind. The article has a short video demonstrating some of the proposed changes. To me, I’ve always felt that Ubuntu’s notification system felt, well, just old-school. No transparency and it feels a little blocky to me…

Anyways, I’m looking forward to how this plays out in the next release. I’m sure it’ll be irritating and a little buggy at first, but I think this is a great step in the direction of making Ubuntu a little more “smooth”-looking.

Okay, here’s the deal. The version of HPLIP which comes with Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) is a much newer version than the one which came with Hardy Heron (8.04). when I realized that, all I did was plug my printer in and turn it on. within approximately 2 minutes (less actually, I think) the printer had been detected and installed. Now that’s what I call plug ‘n play!

Hats off to the development team and the dudes which manage all those packages – ya’ll hit the nail right on the head with this!

Well, irritation of irritation, I found my Intrepid Ibex installation didn’t include an Audio CD Extractor by default. I’ve started a thread on Ubuntu Forums asking how to get it…but until that bears fruit I’ve been playing around with my audio programs.

I normally use Amarok for my music, it is still my favorite player:

sudo apt-get install amarok

But I heard about a few other ones that are pretty cool. Beep Music Player eXperimental (bmpx). It seems pretty cool:

sudo apt-get install bmpx

On the other hand, Listen (yes, that’s the name of the player) seems to be very similar to Amarok…almost like Rythmbox meets Amarok, because it uses panes to display your library like Rhythmbox, but it incorporates Wikipedia and aparently lyric data as well. I think I may actually play with it a bit more. But I can’t tell if it automatically updates it’s music library, which is a favorite feature of mine for Amarok. Run this to get Listen:

sudo apt-get install listen

And now…..dah duh duuuummmmm! I feel like an idiot. (figured this out as I was posting…) The Audio CD Extractor I was looking for was Sound Juicer….and you can install it thusly:

sudo apt-get install sound-juicer

just make sure you’ve installed the ubuntu-restricted-extras package so you can rip to mp3s…

It seems one thing that Apple got completely right with their OS was the application dock. Well Linux has several different ones, but the two most powerful (and stable) ones, in my mind, are AWN (Avant Window Navigator) and Cairo Dock. Each of them have their pros and cons, so I am going to (quickly) detail how to install each of them in Intrepid so you can try ‘em out and see which you prefer.

AWN

A much more stable version of this is available in the regular repositories, so you can just run this to install a basic (but pretty stable) version:

sudo apt-get install avant-window-navigator

Alternatively, in Synaptic, do a search for “avant” and choose ‘avant-window-navigator’ for installation.

This will actually install a bunch of other programs (and extras) that go with AWN, but it’s all needed. To install different themes (or make it it more Mac-like) you can go here.To add launchers to the dock just find ‘em in the menu and drag them to the dock.

Cairo Dock

Cairo Dock is not found in the regular repositories, so you have to do a little more work to get it, but the work is definitely worth it. You need to add this repo to your Software Sources:

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

Then open the terminal and run this command (sorry, no simpler way to do it than this!):

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

That last line is the GPG key which identifies the repo…it just needs to be added! After that you need to reload or update your sources. Hit ‘Reload’ in Synaptic, or in Terminal run:

sudo apt-get update

Now, to install you just need to do these two packages: ‘cairo-dock’ and ‘cairo-dock-plug-ins’. You can search for them in Synaptic or run this in Terminal:

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

Note: when working through these steps I could not find the ‘plug-ins’ package in Synaptic, so I ran the installation in Terminal and everything worked fine.

One thing I love about Ubuntu and Linux in general is all the totally free software. I finally got rid of my only Windows installation and now I have a bunch of (old) commercial software I have no need for – mainly because I’ve found everything I need in the Open Source market. Here are a few programs that I highly recommend, mainly because whenever I install Ubuntu, these are all programs I install right off the bat. There are so many more great ones out there, but I don’t have near the space or time to get into them all.

To install them you can either do a search in Synaptic Package Manager for the parenthesized word, or just type this in the Terminal, replacing program-name with the parenthesized word for the program you desire:

sudo apt-get install program-name

At the end of the blog I’ll give you a terminal command which will actually install everyone of these programs.

Gnome-Do – (gnome-do, gnome-do plugins) Hands-down one of the most awesome programs you can get. Basically after installing it, hit Alt+F2 and type in “gnome-do” (or add that command to your startup programs so it’ll always be running at startup). Now, whenever you want to launch something, or even search for something, hit the Power button (the little windows button on PC keyboards) and the Space Bar at the same time, then type in the program or website you want and then hit ‘Enter’. And there are tons of add-ons for music and documents and all kinds of stuff if you really want to get into them. Awesome. Just completely awesome.

AbiWord – (abiword) A very lightweight word processor. This baby is very quick to launch and has a decent amount of capabilities. It’s compatibility with other document formats is its only weakness. But I like to use for short, non-essential write-ups that I don’t need all of OpenOffice.org’s capabilities for.

Wine – (wine) This program enables many windows programs and games to work in Linux. I like to have it ready to go if I ever needed it

Wesnoth – (wesnoth-all) What is a game doing in this list? Hey, I always like to have at least one or two solid games on my computer! Though the wee little games which come in ubuntu are nice – this is a rather robust real-time-strategy game with a good element of RPG mixed in for good measure. Definitely worth checking out.

Gnomesword – (gnomesword) A pretty solid Bible program. Not quite as in depth as eSword, but it does a decent amount. You have to install modules from within the program, but that’s not hard to do at all.

Bluefish – (bluefish) A very robust HTML editor. I actually used this to edit and maintain my old website before I switched to a more blog-based setup. It fires up pretty quickly, so if there’s any HTML editing you need to do, this is handy to have.

Quanta Plus – (quanta) This is also a web-design program, but you can supposedly manage your site from within it. Also, there is a pretty decent WYSIWYG GUI as well. There are a few other dependencies you have to install yourself for full functionality, but it tells you what they are when you open the program.

In Synaptic you can choose as many programs to install at once as you want. You can do the same in Terminal. You just use the command from above, but put a spce between each additional program you want to install. Like this:

sudo apt-get install abiword wine wesnoth-all bluefish

To install all the programs above, the line is pretty long, but it runs like this:

sudo apt-get install gnome-do gnome-do-plugins abiword wine wesnoth-all gnomesword bluefish quanta

Everybody hears about the amazing eyecandy available in Linux – primarily because of CompizFusion. It actually is installed and activated by Ubuntu if your computer is capable of handling it. If you right-click on your desktop and click on “Change Desktop Background” a window will open up with a tab entitle “Visual Effects”. Usually the ‘Normal’ setting is chosen, click on the ‘Extra’ setting to enable the wobbly windows and a few others. But to really tweak it and enable all it can really do, you need to just install a GUI (graphical user interface) to adjust the settings.

Open up the Synaptic Package Manager and do a search for “compiz”. In the results, check these programs for installation: compizconfig-settings-manager, emerald, and fusion-icon.

Alternatively, you could open up the Terminal and run this command:

sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager emerald fusion-icon

Fusion Icon

Now, to get the Fusion icon running (the easiest way to control CompizFusion), just press Alt+F2 and type “fusion-icon” in the window that pops up – it’ll finish typing it for you if everything installed correctly. When you hit ‘Enter’ your screen will flicker and then windows will lose their borders for a bit, but then everything should be back to normal and a little icon should be in the system tray resembling a box. If you hover your mouse over the icon it’ll say “Compiz Fusion Icon”. Right-click and choose “Settings Manager” to start your tweaking.

To make it so that this icon is there when you turn your computer on, go to Sessions (System -> Preferences -> Sessions) and under ‘Startup Programs’ click “Add”. You can call it and describe it however (or if) you want, but the command you enter is “fusion-icon”. Next time you boot up, the icon should be in the tray and ready for you to use!

CompizFusion

Here are a few of my favorite options to enable (under ‘Settings Manager’ of the Fusion Icon):

Opacify – this will cause the window in use to become rather see-through (you can adjust how much) if you move your mouse to hover over another window in the background, so you can see that window.

Desktop Cube & Rotate Cube - under ‘General Options’ set your Desktop Size, in the Horizontal Virtual Size option, to four, choose these two options to enable. now you can hit Ctrl+Alt+Right (or Left) to switch desktops, or alternatively use the scroll button on the background to switch between the different desktops (you can also hit Ctrl+Alt+MouseButton1 to control the cube with your mouse).

Window Previews – this is just handy, and works just like in Vista (and, I think, OSX).

Shift Switcher or Ring Switcher – just hit Power+Tab and see how the windows switch. The Shift Switcher is enabled by default, and it’s slighly similar to Vista’s fancy window shifter. I also enjoy the Ring Switcher, but I wouldn’t recommend having both activated (though you can do that). Whichever you choose, double check the bindings so you can make sure you know exactly how you want to shift through the windows with it.

Scale – this is basically what OSX (Macs) do with the Reveal function. It is enabled by default, but I suggest a specific binding. Click on the option, and under the “Bindings” tab, find the ‘Initiate Window Picker For All Windows’ option with a screen next to it. The binding for it should be none or disabled. Click on the button, make sure it is enabled and then choose the top right corner of the screen in the window that pops up (it should turn green after you choose it). Click ‘OK’. Now move your pointer to the top right of your (entire) screen – all of your open windows should be “revealed”for you to choose from.

Emerald Theme Manager

The other program that you installed is Emerald, which basically offers fancier window decorations. It comes with none by default, so you have to download them and install them. I find most of mine on Gnome-look.org. Here are a few new ones I found on there: Vienniece (there are actually three variations you can get one this page), Deleting Oxygen, Cofee and Cream, and warmachinetheme.

Because of what basically boils down to legal reasons Ubuntu doesn’t come with native commercial DVD support. It’ll still  play un-encrypted DVDs (like homemade ones), but you have to take a few steps to get the commercial ones to play. And don’t sweat the legal side of it, because as best I can understand there are no legal repercussions to you installing the codecs to play the DVDs yourself, it’s just a little grey for Cannonical to include them in Ubuntu.

That said, if you’ve already installed the “ubuntu-restricted-extras” package, you’re already halfway there (if not, do so!). Now all you have to do is open the terminal (Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal) and type this:

 sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/install-css.sh

It will prompt you for your password. Remember that it will not even show that you’ve typed anything, but the password is being entered as you type it – the lack of visual confirmation is a security feature.

Now, I know I had said that I was going to try and keep the Terminal commands to a minimum, but the alternative to running this command in Terminal is just very involved and doing it this way is much easier.

Alright. After snagging the latest updates, I had to reboot. But I’m good to go for setting up so I can play mp3s and commercial DVDs.

First, I have to open up ‘Software Sources’ (System -> Administration -> Software Sources), click on the “Ubuntu software” tab (should be open by default). I just want to make sure all the first four (main, universe, proprietary, and multiverse) are checked. (then close it)

Now I go to the Synaptic Package Manager (System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager). Do a search for “restricted-extras” and click on the box next to the result “ubuntu-restricted-extras” and choose ‘mark for installation’.  Then go up to the top and hit “apply”. After everything downloads and installs you’ll be ready to play those mp3s!

Just a note, that the ubuntu-restricted-extras installs a whole lot of programs on your computer. You’ll probably be a little surprised at all the ‘junk’ which you find under your ‘Accessories’ menu. Some of ‘em are good programs, others…a little more technically inclined. But this not only installs what you need for mp3s, but also codecs for other restricted media, as well as all the codecs needed for commercial DVDs, except for one. (I’m going to cover that in another post).

okay, I’m installing the latest version of Ubuntu onto my laptop, and I’m going to be blogging about all the different steps I’m taking to get it all squared away.

I am installing Ubuntu 8.10 on a Gateway Inspiron laptop with 512 Mb of RAM, a 60 Gb hard drive, and I think a 1.6 Ghz Pentium processor. It’s not great, but it runs Ubuntu pretty solidly.

I’d forgotten how easily Ubuntu installs. I think from start to finish it took roughly 30 minutes. Of course, a 60 Gb hard drive doesn’t take as long to format as larger ones. But it was just stinking quick.

I made sure my laptop had an ethernet connection via a network cable on the initial boot, within about a minute of booting up it had detected my broadcom wireless card and was prompting me as to if I wanted to install the driver. I did, of course.

The first thing I did after booting up was to install the Foxmarks add-on for Firefox. That synched up all my bookmarks and passwords. Then I installed Dropbox, and it is presently synching up all my documents (note, both of these programs had already stored my files on their servers from my previous installation). I highly recommend both of these for synchronizing between computers and operating systems.

Of course, what made me laugh was the updates I had to install. Ibex has been out for almost two months, so they’ve had a lot of time to tweak and fine-tune the OS. The update download was almost 200 Mb.

As a side note, all this initial setup I’ve done has been apart from the command-line. Most of it, you’ll note, I actually did from the browser. I’m going to strive to do all my installations and tweaking (as much as I can) outside the command line. I actually love using the terminal, but I know it intimidates a lot of people. I want them to know how to do these things without having to fire up the old terminal.