Kristle Chester

When I left Mac for Ubuntu, there were a few programs that I missed. Skitch, this really amazing screenshot app that integrates with the web and causes your colleagues to deposit copious amounts of drool on their keyboards when they see the quality of your work product, was right underneath Scrivener in the most missed category. (Funny, all the programs that I really miss seem to start with an S…) I’d sort of given up and reverted to taking screenshots and then editing them with a combination of GIMP and Inkscape. Then I found Shutter.

This little jewel does everything I need it do quickly and with a minimal of fuss. It has some nice plugins, a built in editor, and a low learning curve. Nice, eh? Here are

As several people have reminded me, I did promise a quick run through of some of the changes I made following the Ubuntu upgrade. As I mentioned in that post, I have a black listed graphics card and an older machine, but I don’t believe I made any of these changes due to hardware issues. *Begin rant* I do enough hacking for others people. I have ZERO desire to do it on my own machine. If something doesn’t work out of the box or with only a minimum of tinkering, the chances are pretty high I’ll ditch it or never try it. This means I prefer to install all of my software from either repositories or .deb installation files. There are legitimate reasons for doing this other

I tend to bounce from one LTS version to another. It’s not that I don’t like the *.1 versions, but upgrading takes time. Unless there is a substantial performance or software package difference, I don’t upgrade. So when I decided to upgrade to 9.04 from 8.04, there was no longer an upgrade to 8.10 button on my machine. I’m now writing this in Ubuntu 9.04 which runs beautifully on my old 8.04 box. For a variety of reasons, I did not do a fresh install.

My Box:

• Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.40GHz
• 1253 MiB Memory (upgraded last year)
• 2368 MiB Swap Memory
• Intel Corporation 82845G/GL [Brookdale-G]/GE Chipset Integrated Graphics Device

In case you haven’t noticed, this isn’t exactly the latest/greatest anything. In computer terms

Following the horrendously difficult installation of my Wacom Bamboo MTE-450 on my OpenSUSE 11.0 desktop, I was a little terrified of the installation process under Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. My fears were groundless. After following these instructions, I rebooted my computer and it works perfectly

Before reading this post, there are few things you should know…

1. You can run a working ITunes installation under Wine; provided, it’s installed properly (i.e. Wine maps your IPod and CD drives correctly and you installed QuickTime before installing ITunes).
2. Apple will most likely not create a native version of ITunes for Linux.
3. Using P2P networks to exchange copyrighted material is not okay. You should pay for multimedia content, including books, films, and music.

Why I Don’t Like ITunes

ITunes is a wonderful concept for purchasing content. Unfortunately, it locks the users into Apple’s approved file formats and to Apple devices. Both of these are problematic. By forcing users to use a particular file format, Apple is supporting one technology over another. Because of their

Tools Used for the Below Example:

• Working Ubuntu 8.10 Installation
• HFS Plus (i.e. formatted on a Mac) IPod (also tested with NTFS (Windows formatted) IPod)

Note: Yes, you can do all of the below quickly and easily with the command line. However, many Linux users, particularly newbies, are unfamiliar with the command line. Learning the command line is a major barrier for most newbies and does turn them off Linux. For that reason, all of my guides will rely on the Synaptic Package Manager and pre-packaged installs as much as possible.(Under the Synaptic Package Manager, click Settings > Repositories. Under the Ubuntu Software tab, check all the boxes.)

Step 1: Backup the IPod.

Connect your IPod to your computer. If your IPod is formatted for Windows, it should automatically show up as a usb device