Posts Tagged ‘Ubuntu’

For this How-To, I’m going to show you how to change the top level menu name “Applications” in Ubuntu Jaunty. No-third party installation manager software is going to be used here.  Just some good old CLI hacking.

After doing some research I found that most of the answers to this question were complete bullshit.  From what I found a lot of these resources showed you how to change/add items and menus using the menu editor.

If what I want to achieve could be done with the menu editor, I would have done it with the menu editor.

This tutorial is for those running Ubuntu with GNOME…if your using KDE or any others your out of luck here.  In the default Ubuntu desktop installation the “Applications” menu name is hard coded into the GNOME-Panel.  So basically what we need to do is download the source for GNOME-Panel, hunt down the file that names the top level menu “Applications”, change it, compile the source, and reinstall GNOME-Panel.  Sound Tricky?  It’s not that hard actually.
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Well after doing some major research the last few days, and successfully changing my Ubuntu 9 (Jaunty) usplash, I thought I would be a kind soul and provide you all with this little tutorial.  First letme explain that this may not work for you, however it is simply a modification of the current usplash.  This will aim to show you how to get started on creating your own usplash customizations.

Usplash works by reading a compiled library much like a .dll in Windows.  These are denoted by the extension .so (shared object).   Usplash has a default theme manager you can interact with called usplash-artwork.so, you will see how to use this later on in the how-to.  It is simple, and no-nonsense.

Here are a couple of resources you may find useful in your learning experience.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=771410

http://ubuntusatanic.org/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=21&page=1

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=622018 (note: that I only partially used this as a reference.)

This how-to is going to walk you through building your own custom usplash theme.  It does not use startup manager or any kind of 3rd party usplash manager crap.  I am going to assume you know what your doing at command line a little bit. Read the rest of this entry »

You can install Ventrilo under Wine very easily in Ubuntu Linux 8.04.  I did it and got it working in well under an hour.  Here is how you can accomplish such a feat. so you can join your friends on a Vent server whilst gaming or whatever else you may use Ventrilo for.

First : Make sure you have the newest version of Wine setup and installed.

Second : Download Ventrilo for Windows (Here) and install it under Wine.

Third : Now Vent at default requires the use of an audio codec called GSM 6.10, and from my own experience this codec/driver is not included in WINE right of the bat, so youll have to get the file msgsm32.acm (here) and place this file in your system directory under Windows in WINE (you may also try putting it in system32 which is fine, i actually put in both spots to be sure).

Forth : goto the Windows directory (should be /home/.wine/drive_c/windows) and open the file named system.ini and place this line in it under the drivers32 section (for organization sake)

MSACM.msgsm610=msgsm32.acm

ok now you may not have to, but I restarted my computer

Voila! You should now have Vent working, now you may get some errors, but they shouldnt hinder your use to voice chat, as well I have found out and it may only be on my computer and not others but Overlays wouldnt work, but i think it was hardware issue, youll just have to try it out yourself! I hope this helps any of you having trouble with getting this working, also make sure to keep an eye out, the guys who develop Vent are working on a Linux client! Enjoy.

ok so some people have asked me to tell them how to change some certain things in their Ubuntu desktop to make it look more of their own, things such as the main panel icon, panel font colors etc…So here we go heres how you can do some of this stuff.

Ubuntu uses a so called “Human” theme at default, so I will assume thats what your using at the moment, but these little tricks should apply to other themes as well, however don’t quote me on it.

Changing the Main Icon of the main panel

To accomplish this nifty trick take whatever graphic you want to use as the new icon and resize it to 22px by 22px, honestly I have mine resized to 30px by 24 or 25px, LOL, also it may be a good idea to make sure you have a transparent background to the image so that your icon will look fine with other colored backgrounds/themes…rename the resized image to:

start-here.png 

now CP or move the new icon to the folder:

/usr/share/icons/Human/22×22/places

Go back to /usr/share/icons/Human and delete the file icon-theme.cache open up terminal and type:

sudo gtk-update-icon-cache /usr/share/icons/Human

killall gnome-panel 

If all went well you should now see your logo/graphic as the menu icon now

Changing panel font colors 

This is handy for lightening up those fonts to be readable for darker custom themes…open up your home folder and make sure you can view all hidden files, look for the file .gtkrc-2.0

If the file isnt there open up your text editor and create one, put this into that file:

style “panel”
{
fg[NORMAL] = “#ffffff”

}

widget “*PanelWidget*” style “panel”
widget “*PanelApplet*” style “panel”

edit fg[NORMAL] = “#ffffff” for your desired font color thenhead back to terminal and killall gnome-panel again.

Changing default theme colors miscellaneous stuff 

Open up the file /usr/share/themes/Human/gtk-2.0/gtkrc

check out this file and edit the colors as you see fit, after editing this file i restarted X (ctrl-alt+backspace) twice to get my results…

Have fun with it!

So you’ve just installed Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) and you want to setup a testing server on your machine. This is incredibly more easy to do and configure than installing on a win32 machine. Since Ubuntu is based on Debian in many ways, using APT-GET and understanding package management makes the process so much more efficient. So how do you setup a testing server on your Ubuntu Linux box? Just follow these simple steps:

Open the command line (terminal):

Installing Apache Web Server:

sudo apt-get install apache2

yup that easy! Now your going to want to test the installation to make sure all went well, to do this we are going to make some custom launch buttons that will initiate Apache, stop it or restart it.

Right click a launch panel and choose ‘+Add to panel’ to bring up the ‘Add to Panel’ dialog

Next choose the ‘Custom Application Laucher’ button at the top.

In this dialog I chose ‘Application in Terminal’ as the type, name as the command to be used (ex. Apache Start) and the command to be executed. The commands for each button are as follows:


sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 start : this is to start the Webserver
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart : to restart the server

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 stop : to stop the server

(Note: you can also choose an icon to be used by clicking the icon in the dialog )

To test the webserver…start it, open your favorite browser and goto http://localhost or http://127.0.0.1

you should get a directory listing, simply click the directory listed and you should get a page that says “It Works!” Your default document directory is located at /var/www

Installing PHP

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Just thought I’d share some screenshots of my desktop. Feel free to comment!

After spending the last few weeks learning PHP, I have decided to combine this knowledge with my other proficient language – Java. How? Via PHP/Java Bridge available at http://php-java-bridge.sourceforge.net/pjb/.

This tutorial will explian the uses of the PHP/Java Bridge, some example code and a breif how to for installing it on an Ubuntu Server 7.10.

If you navigate to the projects website, it states that “The php/java bridge allows you to quickly access java classes from within your PHP scripts without having to know Java. It also allows you to access PHP scripts from within your Java classes without having to know PHP.”

Why might you want to do this? Well, it allows more functionality and flexability within your applications. Here is some example code of php/java bridge being utilizied. (Please note that I do not explain either language, it is assumed that you already know them)


public class phpJavaExample{
public static void main(String[] args){
//Don't need a main method as we are calling it from php, this is only for compiling issues.
}

public String flyNinja() {
String ninja = “FlyNinja is a great resource for all your intellectual, technological and compulsive needs.”;
return ninja;

}

}

This bit of code above is a simple java class, with one single method which returns a string when called from the php.


< ?php

java_require(“/var/www/javaphp/classes/”); //this is the location of your java class
$javaObject = new Java(“phpJavaExample”); //This calls the java class file in php.

//calls the java method flyNinja()
$fly = $javaObject->flyNinja();
echo ‘This is what is returned from the flyNinja method: ‘ . $fly;

@java_reset();

?>

The php file is simply creating an instance of the java class, calling a method which is returning an object. The object is then stored in a php variable, which is then printed on the screen. Here is a screenshot of the final product.

How to install PHP Java bridge on Ubuntu Server 7.10:

First you must install the following java files on your system if you have not done so already.

sun-java6-jre
sun-java6-fonts
sun-java6-jdk
sun-java6-plugin

Next, you must download the PHP Java Bridge deb files from sourceforge, head over there to grab the latest source.

Remember the directory name to which you downloaded the .deb files to and use the following commands:

sudo apt-get install liblucene-java libitext-java
sudo dpkg -i php-java-bride_*.deb (where * is your currently version)

Finally, you can restart apache (sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart) and you are ready to go. Use phpinfo() to double check if everything is installed correctly.