Techblog: Gnome 3

Techblog: Gnome 3: My last post reflected a lot about compiz , recently i came across Gnome 3 , i am going to post my experiences with Gnome 3 in this latest...

Gnome 3

My last post reflected a lot about compiz , recently i came across Gnome 3 , i am going to post my experiences with Gnome 3 in this latest installment of my techblog post.

1. This shell is amazingly cool in terms of application invocation "Until now we used Gnome-do to do fast application invocation " ,
2. In gnome 3 shell click the super button on the laptop and the screen below gets invoked just type in the program just the way you use gnome do and it will work just liked gnome-do
3. Moving windows with in workspaces is even better than Gnome 3 just tap windows button now just move windows through work spaces

Now for the instructions on how to install it. This is meant for ubuntu natty

• sudo apt-get install gnome-shell
• now if you have intel graphics card then run export GNOME_SHELL_DISABLE_TFP=1
• Then run "gnome-shell --replace"
• Now this by default does not bring in all the things like battery status for which you will have to run sudo apt-get install gnome-power-manager
• You can also enable a dock by installing apt-get install gnome-shell-extensions-dock

This will have your cool Gnome 3 shell up in natty will add lucid later to list .. till then have fun :)

Ubuntu 11.04 Cairo dock problem

Looks like i will have to get rid of my cairo dock , I am facing an unusual problem

as you can see in the image on the left side , my cairo dock is failing to draw the icons outside itself and i can't seem to be able to fix it.This is how it happened

I decided to upgradc banshee so i got the new ppa's in the software sources , then ran the software upgrade after which i have been facing this problem and i have no idea why and whats wrong.

What had happened even previous to that was all my cool gadgets and nice cool ways to moving around the linux desktop was gone.

In one of my effort i enabled something called fake transparency to make this work and suffice it to say it did not :( .

But since dock is the most important thing untill now i hardly cared so much. Now that dock broke i had to do something quick.

I started to read around to find out whats going on , after cruel searching and applying my brains and after many fruitless pursuits i finally seem to have figured it out .

What had happend was my compiz manager was not loaded as window manager at all , That solved the mystery of cool effects lost , but what about dock.

The dock does not require compiz to be around to work. Even then i decided to see why compiz is not running.

compiz --replace

trying to run this command seem to have loaded compiz but crashed instantly . Then i came about the post which called for inderect rendering

compiz --replace --indirect-rendering

this crashed my system to the point where i could not use keyboard at all , So i immidetely swithched my terminal CTRL + ALT + F1

and loggged in there and did

sudo service gdm restart

This basically restarts your gnome desktop manager

I came across the post quoting the following to be installed

sudo apt-get install freeglut3-dev

After which i realised that my opengl was still broken so i downloaded some packages which started with libgl-mesa-dri libgl-mesa-dri-dbg and dev packages

and then did

compiz --replace --indirect-rendering

And wallah my compiz not only got loaded was working fine.But dock was still in ruins i could not fix it.

While the cool effects were back on but my original requirement did not get fulfilled.

Then i realised i had enabled fake transperancy which i promptly disabled which fixed my dock .Yay !!!!!!!!!!1 :) ;)

Webmin

When working with Linux , speacially a linux machine far away from you , you need to use ssh to connect , but i am pretty sure everyone will agree using ssh to work with linux is not everyone's cup of tea , So when i came across a tool called webmin. I started installing two things on nearly all machines i worked with

• Openssh server
• Webmin

Webmin is a lightweight tool to handle almost everything , although i have not explored it completely , I know it allows me a complete control of Apache and any other service running on machine.

Also file upload feature very useful when needing to transfer files to server makes is a peice of cake to work with files not to mention the editor which allows one to add files to the server without any problems

How to install (Ubuntu)
In order to get webmin you will have to add it to your repository

You can add this repo in the software center or simply add these lines in the sources list of apt which is mostly located at /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://download.webmin.com/download/repository sarge contrib

deb http://webmin.mirror.somersettechsolutions.co.uk/repository sarge contrib
Following this one must get the key to be able to install webmin package


Download following file using a browser then add it in authentication panel of software center


http://www.webmin.com/jcameron-key.asc


Now wait for ubuntu software center to get updated info and them search webmin in the software center click on install


After this just log on to


https://{server-address-here}:10000

Installing phppgadmin

I wanted to use the newer Ubuntu 11.04 ,but in my work environment we are required to work with Ubuntu 10.04.

So i went ahead and installed it in my home laptop , This was meant for my personal use , hence i populated with other office environment apps(for study and research purposed) as needed apache, php5, mysql etc. That came from apt repositories.

Now when I went ahead to install phppgadmin, where i faced an unusual dependency problem where I got this error

php5-common=5.3.5-1ubuntu7 is needed and is not going to be installed.

Now i guessed that all other packages probably got updated besides php5-pgsql , and hence broken dependency

So like any other curious cat i decided to do google it.

In my previous attempts of getting older packages I had found out that in apt-get commands if you mention the package name specifically then it gets that exact version.

although i never got around to actually understand and use it, Since this was my personal laptop , so decided to experiment with it. Finally I did

sudo apt-get install php5-common=5.3.5-1ubuntu7

And boy , was I surprised ,This command got the required comman pacakage but removed all other packages like phpmyadmin along with lots of other packages which left my php install in ruins.

Breaking my install of php module and the other dependent softwares too. Which hung up on me requiring to restart apache and this would not happen since mod-php broke during my attempt to get what i want.

Now neither i could remove or install anything in php , since any such actions would require apache to restart, which it would not since phpmod.so went missing

After scratching my head for a while i understood the problem and ,

I simply went ahead and disabled mod-php5 by

sudo a2dismod php5

Which allowed my apache to restart and post-install scripts which block my apt install commands to complete

Immediately following this, I fired purge of packages including phpmyadmin which now worked.But still my php remained in ruins.

Now i went ahead and got all the packages back, which (surprisingly to my horror) still did not repair my apache mod.

Again after a lot of head scratching and complaining , I realized that some dependency is still broken upon research i came across some search results and got the package name needed , which i used in following command

sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5

After this i fired commands to get rest of needed packages to get my system upto speed, including

sudo apt-get install phppgadmin

Now you may feel it's still not working restart the system , it may take a while but it works

Note: phppgadmin is still not released for pgsql database server 8.3+ , neither has a php-pgsql package released for newest version( hence need to downgrade the php install). { This note is a deduction and i can not ascertain accuracy of this information }