Mac 2 Ubuntu

I write this as Feisty is installing right now. Isn’t it neat that I can post to my blog and install Ubuntu at the same time? Yep, all on the same computer.

I installed the current release (Edgy) earlier in the week on a friend’s computer. I feel safe in saying that there have been astounding improvements to the installation process. It was already pretty good but among other things, it has a much better interface for configuring your hard disks. The intelligent choices it gives you are correct most of the time. If you think you need something else or if you have already installed linux and want to install on top of it, it is easier than ever before. When customizing your hard disk configuration, there is a simple list of partitions and a format checkbox next to each one. This is the by far the least overwhelming and uncomplicated hard disk configuration interface ever devised.

My next favorite improvement to the installer is the super-cool ability to import your settings from Microsoft Windows! It imports bookmarks, settings and your accounts from all Windows installations it can find.
There are bunches of other improvements to this Live-CD that foreshadow the great advancements in technology that this release brings. Things are snappy even though they are running off a CD. Menus pop up just as fast as normal and applications don’t take very long to load. This is quite subjective, but that is my point. This live CD feels way faster. Everything about Feisty is shaping to feel great. The installation completed while I was writing this so its time to reboot, customize things, move my files over, and give things a good test!

I am very excited about the next release of Ubuntu. It is going to blow Vista’s features away and have the ability to compete with Mac OS X at a graphical level for the first time. I would like to remind new visitors that my guide to making Ubuntu at least as enjoyable and functional as a Mac is still around and quite relevant. Some of the suggestions I made for getting things working may be a bit out of date for release 6.10 (Edgy Eft). 6.06 (Dapper Drake) is still a supported version and I still run it. So, I was unable to write a guide for Edgy Eft. But do not fear! I can’t wait to get my hands on release 7.04, that Feisty Fawn. I will be testing it out soon in preparation for its release. I would like to have a new updated guide that addresses some of the features of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and some the amazing new features of Feisty. Bring it on!

The Ubuntu ISO Burning Howto exemplifies the subtle convenience of Ubuntu’s interface. To burn an ISO CD image, you insert a blank disc, press ignore when the dialog pops up asking you what to do, then right click on the disk image and click “Write to Disc.” That is 3 clicks!

There are many out-of-the-way features hidden in those menus when you right-click on files. You can send files via bluetooth, zip files, and share folders on the network. These tasks require a lot of work on a Mac. Sharing a specific folder on the network isn’t even possible with a Mac!

A new version of Ubuntu came out on October 26. The new version includes a few of the features by default that I wrote about in my previous article. This is good news! Some of the steps you previously had to take are already there upon installing it. I am in the process of evaluating the new version and checking out what is installed out of the box. Unfortunately, a few things are still not there by default. For example, Bonjour support and Beagle (Spotlight) are still missing.

On the plus side, there are some amazing new features that bring Ubuntu even closer to having a total replacement for the iLife suite. F-Spot, the new photo manager has a slick interface which includes the thumbnail zooming you have come to expect, slideshow options, and keyword tagging, as well as a timeline of your photos.

So, get ready for a new how-to on getting started with the Edgy Eft! View Ubuntu’s press release for a more complete feature list.

Or, How to make Ubuntu more useful than a Mac.

There are a few things lacking from Ubuntu but the improvements more than make up for them. I recently made the switch after months of exploring and evaluating Ubuntu’s latest release. What I found is that for every task that I do on my Mac, there is a better program that accomplishes the same task on Ubuntu. This includes small user interface features as well as iLife and productivity apps.

The Fine Print

Before I show you the goods, let me clear a few things up. I recommend that you read the Ubuntu Desktop Guide for instructions on installing software, maintaining things and getting around. I do put some information of that sort in my installation instructions but this article is more of a review than an in-depth technical guide. If I do not give enough detail on installing software or any other task it is almost certainly in a prominent place in the Ubuntu guide. Feel free to ask questions in the comments section, I will update this article with greater detail when appropriate.I use some special formatting to make things easier to understand.

Software packages that you will install with a package manager such as Synaptic are written like this: package-name.

Menu navigation instructions are written like so: System > Help. This means to click “System” in the top-left corner and then click “Help”.

Lines that should be typed into a Terminal program (Accessible under Applications > Accessories > Terminal) are colored like this:

echo “type or paste this whole line into the terminal as written”

Video Editing

Kino is a mature home video editor with lots of plugins. Check out the kinoplus package for a bunch of cool things. Kino does the usual timeline editing and firewire capture. Where it beats iMovie is its amazing support for special effects. You can chain together video and audio effects. Kino is able to use effects made for other programs such as Effect TV. Effect TV lets you do amazing things like making yourself look transparent, or setting yourself on Fire! You will need to install an additional package for these added plugins. Kino has other nice features such as previewing to an external display.

Suggested Packages

• kino
• kinoplus - plugins for kino
• pitivi

An up and coming video editor called Pitivi is still early in the development stages. Feel free to play around with it. It has most of the basic features. What is most interesting about Pitivi is that it uses Gnome’s next-generation libraries and graphical interface concepts. This program is one to watch out for.

iChat Bonjour

There is still no supported iChat compatible chat client for linux. A student was working on one for Google Summer of Code in 2005 but the code is for Gaim version 2 and it has not been released yet. Gaim is the Ubuntu equivalent to iChat. It supports several chat networks including AIM, MSN, Jabber, and ICQ. You can get a beta (experimental) version of Gaim 2 that includes Bonjour support from http://www.excentral.org/ubuntu/dapper/.

To add his packages to your package list, go into Synaptic and navigate to Settings > Repositories. Now click Add and in the new window, click Custom. Now you can enter the address to the excentral repository by pasting the following line in the prompt:

deb http://www.excentral.org/ubuntu/dapper ./

Now add the channel and you are almost done. You should download excentral’s key file by right-clicking it and saving to disk. This makes sure that when you grab Gaim from excentral’s repository that you are not being fooled into getting a virus from some other place. If you skip this step, you can still download it but you will get a nag screen telling you that it can’t authenticate the package list.

Back in Synaptic’s repository screen, click the Authentication tab and “Import Key File.” Select the file you just downloaded. Now you are done. Click the Reload button to grab the package list. You may browse or search in Synaptic for gaim and upgrade it. Enjoy chatting with your Mac using friends. You wont feel left out!

If you are using Ubuntu on a Mac with a PowerPC (G3, G4, G5) use the following repository address instead along with this key file:

deb http://icculus.org/~kwa/ubuntu/dapper/powerpc / ./

Bonjour (a.k.a Rendezvous and Zeroconf)

In general, Ubuntu has great support for Bonjour enabled services. You can add Bonjour printers, browse bonjour services, and see other computers (mostly Macs) on the network.

Suggested Packages

• avahi
• avahi-discover - Lets you see what Bonjour services are on your network
• service-discovery-applet - cool! Mac people will envy you…

Spotlight-like Instant Search

Add the deskbar applet to the panel and enable the beagle plugin for it Do I miss Spotlight? Au Contraire! When I use a Mac, I miss Deskbar and Beagle! Beagle is like the core of spotlight. It indexes your files and extracts metadata. Deskbar is like the Spotlight button you click (or command-space) to access. Unlike spotlight, you can do extra-cool things with Deskbar. For example, you can type someone’s name or email address and have it create a new email message to the person for you just like that. Deskbar is capable of searching Google as you type and it can open programs by name OR description! So if I can’t remember then name of the video editor but I want to open it quickly, I can press my Deskbar hotkey, type “video editor” and presto! Kino pops up! Pitivi was the second search result. Perfect!

Suggested Packages

• beagle
• deskbar-applet

Note: For much better performance with Beagle, Enable Extended Attributes.

Windows File Sharing

Install samba

Saving as PDF

I don’t recommend messing with printing to PDF in this release of Ubuntu. Currently, you can only save documents to one location. You probably want to use the following alternative instead. Print as “Generic Postscript.” Postscript (PS for short) is the predecessor to PDF and has perfectly good support on Linux and Mac OS X. Windows can view Postscript with additional software (just as with PDF) and Mac OS converts PS to PDF automatically before displaying in Preview. Postscript support is also better supported than PDF by programs such as Adobe Photoshop. Don’t feel bad if you have never heard of it but don’t dismiss it either. While it has been largely superseded by PDF on the desktop, Postscript is great for saving web pages.

That said, If you do want the somewhat limited PDF printing support, here are the directions.

install cups-pdf
sudo chmod +s /usr/lib/cups/backend/cups-pdf
Go to System > Administration > Printing
Double-Click “New Printer”
Use the detected PDF Printer and click Forward
Select Generic for the manufacture and click Forward
Give it a more informative name such as “Print-PDF” (sorry, no spaces) and click Apply
Now when you print, select your “Print-PDF” printer, and print! Your PDF will be saved in the PDF directory in your Home directory.
Thanks to Brian’s comment on this ubuntu blog entry. The body of this post does not contain up-to-date directions. Follow mine!

Additional Miscellaneous Cool Things

• network-manager-gnome
• qemu
• realplay

Do I spy Windows programs?

Install wine.
You can use wine to run many Windows programs. Wine is not compatible with all software for windows and some of the more complicated programs are not simple to install. However, many things work fine by simply downloading them (or inserting the CD) and clicking on the EXE file. For example, the windows version of the Airport Admin Utility works great for managing my Airport network.

Flash Player

The real Flash plugin is flashplugin-nonfree.
Install libflash-mozplugin for a Free alternative that supports the basic flash stuff. It is adaquate for the usual uses of flash on the net.

For mp3 and other codec support

For a firefox video plugin and better codec support, install totem-xine and totem-xine-firefox-plugin. If you want support for patent encumbered formats such as Windows Media and commercial DVDs, visit this official Ubuntu page for in depth information. Ubuntu does let you play these formats but you need to install them separately since Ubuntu can’t distribute them directly. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats

• gstreamer-plugins-good
• gstreamer-plugins-bad
• gstreamer-plugins-ugly (mp3 support)

You may also want to install the versions of these packages in the multiverse repository.

3D Acceleration

Install the nvidia-glx package edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf as root by typing:
sudo gedit /etc/x11/xorg.conf
A text editor will pop up. Do a search for “nv” (INCLUDING quotes). Replace “nv” with “nvidia” to enable the driver. You will need to restart your computer for the changes to take effect. I should note that you rarely ever have to restart a Linux based operating system. If you knew what you were doing, you could enable this driver by inserting the nvidia module into the kernel and restarting X11. However, it is often easier and less error-prone to simply restart your computer. Ubuntu will tell you when you should restart your computer after installing software. It probably told you when you installed this nvidia driver. That leads me to wonder why I typed all of this. Moving on…

Other Commercial Software

You might object to the supposed lack of commercial software. You will be pleased to know that some of the more useful commercial software is available for Ubuntu.
For Realplayer and Opera add this repository to Synaptic, the package manager.

enable the nonfree, universe, multiverse repositories

Trivia and Intrigue

You may have wondered why I mentioned the Finder earlier. As you use Ubuntu, you may notice that a lot of things are in the same places or have the same names as the same things in the Finder. This is because of a little known secret. Nautilus, Gnome’s file manager, was originally designed by Andy Hertzfeld http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Hertzfeld the guy who wrote the original Macintosh user interface! Nautilus is a better Finder than The Finder itself. You are actually using the next generation of the Finder! You will see that is has the “spacial” file browsing style of the wonderful Finder from Mac OS 9 with way more features, broken things fixed, a better design, and a smooth silky feel. I will let you explore most of the differences yourself. There are a couple features I would like to point out. If you hover your mouse over a supported audio file, it will give you an audio preview. Yes, it will play the sound. This is great for when you have a bunch of poorly labeled audio clips or slightly different versions of the same song. Another neat feature is its built-in windows file sharing. You can share any folder by going to System > Administration > Shared Folders. And then there are the little things. You can change a file’s icon easier than on a mac. You just open the file or folder’s properties and click the icon. This will let you choose the icon from a list of known icons or you can select a file. What file formats does it support? A lot more than Apple! You can use regular old images such as those in the png format. Now isn’t that easier than having to create a special icon. You can also use modern formats such as SVG to have truly scalable icons. This is so much more advanced than Mac OS. Your friends will envy you if you have any that actually care.

Miscellaneous Features: There is built-in fast user switching. Press the Quit button in the right-hand corner and click “Switch User.”

P.S. Yup, you can do more on Ubuntu than you can on your Mac.

P.P.S No, the Macbook and Macbook Pro cannot run Ubuntu in all of its glory. You would have better luck with another laptop at this time. Sorry, it is not Ubuntu’s fault that Apple doesn’t use documented hardware.