Hey, who doesn’t like playing around with how their system looks? I think that’s why my wife never lets me touch her phone anymore…

Anyways, I recently ran across what is (apparently) becoming a very popular third-party icon set. And with its own PPA now it’s easier than ever to install and try out. Here’s how I did it:

Enter these two lines in your terminal:

• sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tiheum/equinox
• sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install faenza-icon-theme

Next, right-click on your desktop and choose “Change Desktop Background”, then click on the “Theme” tab and then the “Customize” button at the bottom. Now choose the “Icons” tab in the window that opens up and choose “Faenza” from the list. You can log out and back in to restart your X server to make the changes take effect across your system, but all my icons were changed just by the instructions above.

Enjoy!

With the release of Froyo for Android came the awesome ability to send stuff to your phone from your browser. Very simple and straight-forward to set-up. From what I can tell it uses your Google account to connect devices. Pretty easy to set up. Here’s what I did…

• installed the app on my phone (appbrain link)
• then install the extension on your browser of choice – firefox or chrome
• fire up the app on your phone and follow the prompts – it will have to log into your google account
• click on the extension in your browser, the first time you do this you will have to log into your google account.

I did a test run of this and the response was almost instantaneous. The best part? Since it’s browser based, it’s not OS specific – this will work in OSX, Windows, Linux or whatever else you might desire that has a firefox or chrome browser. I actually use Chromium (the open-source version of Chrome) and it worked perfectly in it as well.

Oh, and here’s a video of it for your viewing pleasure:

I recently acquired a new router which I flashed with the dd-wrt software [DD-WRT v24-sp2 (07/22/09) mega] I recently learned about openDNS and wanted to try it. Not sure if this software is linux based (I don’t really think so…) but it definitely is open-source. Here’s how I got it working:

• set up an account (free!)
• opened up my dd-wrt router in a browser window
• under Setup->Basic Setup tab I left everything the same, except for this:
  • section: “Network Address Server Settings (DHCP)”, in which I changed the first two static DNS servers to the openDNS servers (previously they had been ’0′).
  • those server addresses are:
    • 208.67.222.222
    • 208.67.220.220
• then went under Services->Services and to the “DNSmasq” section
  • had to make sure that both DNSMasq and Local DNS were checked “enable” and then under “Additional DNSMasq Options” put strict-order
  
  

And that’s it! After that the openDNS site confirmed that I was using their servers. Pretty simple.

So far I’m loving the options the free membership offers, especially the filtering you can do. I highly recommend checking out openDNS if you can.

So I finally got my hands on an Android based phone: a Droid X. Sweetness… Yeah, I love the phone so far. Supposedly I’m going to get the 2.2 update tomorrow and that’ll be a whole ‘nuther bag of awesomeness.

So somebody please explain to me why I’m paying $15 a month for a texting plan – on top of my unlimited data plan?! This irritates me no end because texting is nothing more than a limited email system. Don’t believe me? Grab your phone and send a text to your email address, not a phone number. Bam! Not only does it pop up in your inbox as just another email – but you have captured the email address of your cell phone.

Needless to say, I think I’ve figured out a way to trash the texting plan but not lose texting. And it’s all centered around Google Voice. I had to go and sign up and get a local number in Google Voice, but since I already had a Gmail account that was pretty simple. After I got the number I proceeded to play around some. And now, since I’ve gotten my Droid X, my plans of ridding myself of the burden of a texting plan are coming to fruition.

How? Well, Google Voice integrates extremely well with the Android operating system. And that Google Voice number I acquired (the first one is free – costs $10 to change it…) can receive texts. Unfortunately it cannot receive pictures or audio files.

I called up the big V yesterday and set this present billing cycle to be my last one with a texting plan. My wife and I have long since abandoned texting each other. She uses a crackberry Blackberry and we communicate via Google Talk all day long. I’m planning on utilizing this to communicate more often with my friends who have smartphones, and for those who don’t, or can’t, then they can text to my Google Voice number – with the caveat that they will have to send any pictures/audio to my email address instead of the GV number.

So that’s my grand scheme…I’ll post an update in another month or so about how this is working out for me. Has anyone tried this? Any suggestions?

Okay, here’s an apology for all of you faithful readers who have begun to wonder if I dropped off the face of the earth. I’m sorry I haven’t posted in, um, three months…wow. Yeh, sorry about that. Some things crowded up my schedule at the end of the summer and then my third son was born. So yeah, those are my excuses…

I’m back, slightly. The posting will be sporadic for a few more months until the baby starts settling into a better night-time sleeping habit/schedule. I wish I had more time to dedicate to this blog, but with family and work and school, well, blogging just gets dropped off the radar pretty quickly.

In other news, this blog is focused on Linux in general and not necessarily on Ubuntu. Ubuntu has been my starting point into Linux – and I highly recommend it to anyone who is just starting. But I’m branching out. I finally got my Droid X phone in the mail, so I’m going to start a couple of new categories: Android and Droid X. I may also re-organize my present categories to reduce clutter. Clutter irritates me. I’m also going to start a “Google” category which I’ll flag any post related to Google services with – whether it’s about Ubuntu, Linux in general, or Android.

Note that you can subscribe to any specific category rather than just to the blog as a whole, so if you’re only concerned with Ubuntu stuff, then subscribe to that category and you should only receive posts I’ve placed in that category.

Thanks for all your comments and/or feedback!

If you use Chrome or Chromium (and I highly suggest you try them out if you don’t!) here are a couple extensions for Gmail that I discovered that I actually use a lot. Not ground-breaking or breathtaking, but very useful:

Gmail checker – shows if you have any new emails and how many, and also serves as a shortcut to Gmail (opens it in a new tab)

Send from Gmail – does exactly what it says, it just copies the address bar of whatever page you are on and opens up a small gmail window to compose mail with that address in the email. It’s great for tossing pages at friends!

Okay, I’ve been hearing bunches about Lubuntu from various sources and wanted to try it out…without having to download an install disc and deal with all that. They finally released what was supposedly an RC (Release Candidate), so I thought I’d check and see what was in the repos. Yep! Definitely there!

you can install it alongside Ubuntu just like Kubuntu and Xubuntu (as I had hoped you would be able to):

sudo apt-get install lubuntu-desktop

That’s all ya gotta do to install it! I tried it out and it ran freaky fast. Not much on the eye candy – but holy crap, FAST! My system load wasn’t as light as I was hoping it would be, but I still had a bunch of programs open when I checked.

The only thing about installing it is you get this thing called OpenBox with it, some sort of window manager which can replace Metacity, so you could feasibly use it within Gnome, so on your login screen (where you choose your session type) you will now have choises for a “Gnome/OpenBox” as well as an “OpenBox” session. Haven’t tried those yet, though I will eventually, never fear…

I’ve been keeping my eyes on Lubuntu, the newest version of Ubuntu built ground up to run on older, less able machines (supposedly has a much, much smaller RAM footprint than Ubuntu, Kubuntu, or even Xubuntu). OMG Ubuntu noted that they decided to change to a new music player for their 10.10 release in the fall. They chose DeaDBeeF.

Weird name if you ask me.

If you want to check it out, use these commands to add the repo and then install (for 9.10 and 10.04):

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:alexy-smirnov/deadbeef

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install deadbeef

yep, check it out and lemme know what you think! I think I’ll stick with Guayadeque as my player of choice, but this isn’t too shabby…

Ubuntu Geek pointed this program out to me. I haven’t tried it with my iPod, but if I like the way it works with that, I may have found myself a new media player. The player itself is pretty slick, I enjoyed the layout, though I think some people might find it too busy or overwhelming. It runs off Java, so it is actually compatible with any system that can run Java (if I understand it correctly)

You can download an installation file here. If you want to install it in Ubuntu, grab the ‘Deb Package’. As a warning, my installation failed because I hadn’t installed Java in my system, so I would suggest using Synaptic or the Ubuntu Software Center to install Java first and then try to install the Deb Package.

The only drawback I can find in the player is that, (I believe) since it runs in Java, it really doesn’t interact with the OS, so any widgets which might allow you to view/control any media you might be playing won’t detect it. Overall, though, very nice player.

Okay, I’m just slightly addicted to music. I started collecting CDs as a young teenager (while I am not old – and am not telling my age here…I’ve spent more of my life collecting music than I have not….), and my present collection weighs in at just over 22 Gb. To make that amount of music a little more understandable: I could listen to my library for a little over two weeks and two days without repeating a single song. While Banshee and Rhythmbox and Exaile and Amarok are great music players, they all get a little slow working with all that music. And slow gets me a little frustrated.

But then I discovered Guayadeque. Wacky name but awesome, awesome little player. It is really light on the resources. And when I’m doing a search for an artist or an album it is freaky, freaky fast. I do highly suggest this player. Unfortunately it doesn’t have iPod support at this time, which means I’m stuck using Banshee for the time being – which isn’t bad, because Banshee is a pretty solid player. But I just love how Guayadeque works. It’s just stinking awesome.

It does do Last.fm scrobbling, which I like to use. And it’s lyric search function is pretty solid, though I’ve been unsuccessful writing those lyrics to the files of the mp3s, for the present time at least.

Anyways, to install:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:anonbeat/guayadeque

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install guayadeque

And that’s it! Enjoy – and let me know what you think!

(originally discovered here)