Ubuntu and Debian

Ubuntu and Debian are closely related. Ubuntu builds on the foundations of Debian architecture and infrastructure, with a different community and release process.

Debian is "the rock upon which Ubuntu is built".

Debian is a volunteer project to develop a GNU/Linux distribution. Debian was started more than a decade ago. It has several "packages" of free and open source applications and documentation.

Sponsored by Canonical, the Ubuntu project attempts to work with Debian to address the issues that keep many users from using Debian. Ubuntu provides a system based on Debian with frequent time-based releases, corporate accountability, and a more considered desktop interface. Ubuntu provides users with a way to deploy Debian with security fixes, release critical bug fixes, a consistent desktop interface, and to never be more than six months away from the latest version of anything in the open source world.

Most source packages in all Ubuntu components are copied unmodified from Debian, but other sources include apt-get.org, REVU, directly from organisations such as Blackdown and WineHQ, software which has been packaged by Ubuntu developers, and packages created specifically for Ubuntu.

Edubuntu - Go Education

Edubuntu is a Linux distribution targeted for schools and other educational environments. It is a complete operating system, built on the popular Ubuntu distribution, that includes an office suite, web browser, many educational applications, and much more. Edubuntu is designed for a teacher or network administrator to be able to setup a complete classroom quickly and easily.

Some useful links

Official Page

Download

Some screen shots of Edubuntu.

Inkscape Vector Illustrator - Open Source vector graphics editor

Inkscape Vector Illustrator is a free and open source drawing program similar to Illustrator and CorelDraw. It uses W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.

"The name is made up of the two English words 'ink' and 'scape'. Ink is a common substance for drawings, and is used when the sketched work is ready to be permanently committed to paper, and thus evokes the idea that Inkscape is ready for production work. A scape is a view of a large number of objects, such as a landscape or ocean-scape, and thus alludes to the object-oriented nature of vector imagery. "

The latest stable version is 0.46.

To install Inkscape in Ubuntu type the following in terminal,

sudo apt-get install inkscape

Some screen shots of Inkscape Editor.

Software packaging formats in Linux

Linux uses some common formats to distribute software. The most common formats for the average Ubuntu user are:

1. Debian Packages (.deb)
2. Tarballs
3. Red Hat packages (.RPM)

Debian packages (.deb)

Debian Packages are the most common format you will encounter when installing software in Ubuntu. This is the standard software packaging format used by Debian and Debian derivatives. All of the software in the Ubuntu repositories is packaged in this format. Synaptic Package Manager, Add/Remove Applications, Aptitude, and apt-get handle the transaction with the repository behind the scenes.

Tarballs

Tarballs are a large collection of files assembled into a single archive file. The "tar" command is used to combine many files into a single file for archiving or easy distribution. The "gzip" command is used to compress the size of a file so that it takes up less space. A tarball is very similar to a .zip file on Windows or a .hqxfile on Macs. Tarballs have extensions like ".tar.gz", ".tar.bz2" or "TGZ".

RPMs

The Red hat Package Manager or .RPM format is specifically designed for easy installation and management of software packages. The format allows you to automatically install, upgrade and remove software packages. It tracks dependencies -- situations where one package requires another package in order to work correctly -- and will not install software if it depends on another package which is not installed.

Reference: https://help.ubuntu.com

Jaunty’s New Usplash Theme

Canonical has updated the boot splash screen (USplash) theme with a very nice one for Jaunty. As you can see in the image below, the logo is the same as it was in Ubuntu 8.10, but it's smaller and the loading bar was replaced with a thinner and nicer one (see the video below for more details). It looks more professional than the previous one, and the new loading bar has a gradient effect.

Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) will be the last release of the Ubuntu operating system that will use the old USplash software. Starting with Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala), Canonical will replace it with Red Hat's Plymouth.

Jaunty’s New Usplash Theme

Jaunty’s New Usplash Theme Video

Azureus - now called Vuze - Bittorrent Client

Vuze (formerly Azureus) is a free BitTorrent client used to transfer files via the BitTorrent protocol. Vuze is written in Java, and uses the Azureus Engine. The Azureus engine is released under the GNU General Public License, and is free software. However, parts of the recently added Vuze platform carry more restricted licensing terms, and it is no longer possible to install the Azureus engine using the latest installer without first accepting the Vuze license.

The Blue Poison Dart Frog (Dendrobates azureus) was chosen as the logo and named by co-creator Tyler Pitchford. This choice was due to Latin names of poison dart frogs being used as codenames for his development projects. In 2006 "Vuze" was released as an attempt to transform the client into a "social" client by a group of the original developers forming Azureus Inc., shortly to be renamed Vuze, Inc.

To install Vuze in Ubuntu, type the following in terminal.

sudo apt-get install vuze

Ubuntu Kernel

The kernel is the software that directly manages your hardware, allowing application libraries and software like GNOME and Firefox to run on many types of hardware without much difficulty. The kernel is loaded into memory when the system starts and remains in memory.

Monolithic Kernels

Monolithic kernels are kernels that have all of the device modules built directly into the kernel. The advantage of the Monolithic kernel is that it can communicate faster as the device modules are built in. Monolithic kernels are not flexible because a new kernel must be built to add any new peripheral devices. This difficulty often then resulted in a huge kernel as the tendency was to build in support for more devices than was needed to avoid having to build a kernel.

Modular Kernels

The Ubuntu kernel is modular. Modular kernels provide many device modules as separate loadable modules so the kernel is much smaller. Modular kernels are slower in communication to modules because they cannot talk with them directly. The Modular kernel is much more flexible and because of size reduces the boot time of the kernel. The modprobe and insmod commands can be used to load modules.

Kernel modules are object files (they have a .o extension) which were produced by the C compiler but were not linked to a completed executable. Thus the process of loading modules creates this executable link to the kernel. The modules are distributed with the kernel and can be found in /lib/modules.

Here is a view of /lib/modules with the default kernel directory.

ls /lib/modules

To verify which kernel you are running go to the command line and type this command:

uname -r

The difference that you will see is that the generic kernel is set for the i586 and the i686 architectures while the server kernel will focus on the i686 architecture. The reality is that the closer you can tune the kernel to your specific CPU and hardware, the better the performance you will receive.

Dia - the Diagram Editor

Dia is a free open source GTK-based diagram creation program for Gnome. It is similar to Visio. It was originally created by Alexander Larsson.

Dia can be used to draw many different kinds of diagrams. It currently has special objects to help draw entity-relationship models, UML diagrams, flowcharts, network diagrams, and simple electrical circuits.

To install Dia in Ubuntu type the following in terminal.

sudo apt-get install dia

Screen shots of Dia Editor.

Tool Palette window

Diagram View -Ex: UML Diagram

RAR files in Ubuntu

"In computing, RAR is a proprietary archive file format that supports data compression, error recovery, and file spanning. It was developed by a Russian software engineer, Eugene Roshal (hence the name RAR: Roshal ARchive), and is currently licensed by win.rar GmbH as well as being an acronym for 'Rational And Reliable'."

If you need to uncompress a .rar archive in Ubuntu, you can download a program called unrar. In Ubuntu, you can install unrar by opening a terminal and typing

sudo apt-get install unrar

Then read the instructions by typing man unrar.

[UPDATE: to install unrar in Ubuntu you need the Multiverse Repository enabled.]

Basically, to unrar a file in Ubuntu, just navigate to the directory where your rar archive is and type

unrar x [filename.rar]

replacing [filename.rar] with the name of your rar archive.

BlueFish Web Development Editor

BlueFish is a GTK-based (Gnome-oriented) editor to write websites, scripts and programming code. It supports perl, Python, pHp, CSS, XML, Java, Javascript, C, SQL, and other formats.

Bluefish is developed in C/GTK+. Bluefish is relatively lightweight and has a low learning curve, while still providing many features to support development of websites.Bluefish is free software/open source and is released under the GPL licence.

Bluefish was started by Chris Mazuc and Olivier Sessink in 1997 to facilitate web development professionals on Linux platforms.The name Bluefish was chosen after a very cute logo (a child's drawing of a fish, in blue) was proposed on the mailinglist.

To install BlueFish in Ubuntu type the following in terminal.

sudo apt-get install bluefish

Useful links on BlueFish.

BlueFish Official Website

BlueFish Downloads

BlueFish Definitive Guide

Some screen shots of BlueFish Editor.

Audacity - "Free Audio Editor and Recorder"

Audacity is a free, open source application for recording and editing audio. Audacity is cross-platform.

Audacity was created by Dominic Mazzoni while he was a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University. Mazzoni now works at Google, but is still the main developer and maintainer of Audacity, with help from many others around the world.

"You can use Audacity to:

• Record live audio.
• Convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs.
• Edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, WAV or AIFF sound files.
• Cut, copy, splice or mix sounds together.
• Change the speed or pitch of a recording"

The latest stable version is Audacity 1.2

Audacity is not installed by default in Ubuntu. To start using Audacity, install the package audacity from the Universe software channel. For more information on installing packages, see InstallingSoftware.

Useful links on Audacity.

Audacity Official Website

Audacity Download

Audacity Wiki

Some screenshots showing Audacity.

VLC media player - "the cross-platform media player and streaming server"

"VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, ...) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network. " - VLC Official Website.

It is an open source, free software media player written by the VideoLAN project. The latest version is VLC Media Player 0.9.9.

To install VLC in Ubuntu.

Open Synaptic (System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager). Search for vlc and install it. You should also install vlc-plugin-esd, mozilla-plugin-vlc (and libdvdcss2).You must make sure you have a "multiverse" repository activated.

Screen shots of VLC

Tomboy Notes -Simple note taking

Tomboy is a desktop note-taking application for GNOME. It is simple and easy to use, and allows you to organize the ideas and information you deal with every day. Tomboy has some very useful editing features to help you customize your notes, including:

• Highlighting Search Text
• Inline Spell Checking
• Auto-linking Web & Email Addresses
• Undo/Redo Support
• Font Styling & Sizing
• Bulleted Lists

Tomboy is by default installed in Ubuntu. You can find it in Applications -> Accessories -> Tomboy Notes

Some useful links on Tomboy.

Tomboy official site

Tomboy download

A screen shot of article being written in Tomboy. Notice the highlighting and the WikiText.

Do you know that Alien?

If you have an rpm file for a package you wish to install, and if you cannot find a .deb debian package in any of the Ubuntu repositories or elsewhere, you can use the alien package converter application to install the .rpm file.

Despite the large version number(latest version is 8.74), alien is still (and will probably always be) rather experimental software. It has been used by many people for many years, but there are still many bugs and limitations.

Alien should not be used to replace important system packages, like sysvinit, shared libraries, or other things that are essential for the functioning of your system. Many of these packages are set up differently by Debian and Red Hat, and packages from the different distributions cannot be used interchangably. In general, if you can’t uninstall the package without breaking your system, don’t try to replace it with an alien version.

To install alien type the following in terminal.

sudo apt-get install alien

To convert the package.rpm into a package.deb use the following in terminal. [should be done after installation of alien :)]

alien -d package-name.rpm