Hi, my name is Harlem and this is the companion website for the Fresh Ubuntu Podcast. I am the host of the show and along with my co-host Peter, we do a somewhat weekly account about anything that has to do with Ubuntu. Thanks for dropping by the site. Feel free to have a look around and click on some of the great links on the site. Enjoy!
One last thing - I started the podcast in July of 2006, and we have been going strong since then. Initially, it started as my first forays into linux, but now has grown up a bit by delivering the best news, how-to's, and tutorials - all with a bent towards the Ubuntu distro. Subscribe for free using iTunes or other podcast receiver. Thanks again for dropping by!
There is no such thing as a perfect or completely secure computer operating system. Will the machine be a desktop computer or a server; purpose is a key to understanding how to initially install and configure your Linux PC.
There seems to be a lot of excitement with the next release of Ubuntu. Dubbed Feisty Fawn, I am anticipating near record downloads of the cd and hopefully Canonical has prepared for the jolt in traffic. I say bittorrent if you can, otherwise, expect long download times. If, however, you are prepared for it to take awhile you can read the article in the above link while you wait! Oh, and read the comments as they can be enlightning as well. Some of the advice in the column I have done with my Edgy Eft installation back in November. But, there are a number of things in the article that I have yet to learn about and will surely look into it. Overall, lots of good information for new Linux users.
I know, I know, it was a lame joke and I promise it will never happen again. Well, at least I hope so;) Anyhoo, this week I installed Flash 9 Beta on my laptop and it works very great and exceeds my expectations. If you have already tried the tutorial please be aware that using untrusted repositories are to be used AT YOUR OWN RISK!! I myself did not have any problem with it nor do I anticipate any. I would being doing a great disservice to my listeners if I did not include the following;
My advice is when using untrusted repositories (ie, not certified safe by Ubuntu developers) you do so at your own risk. If you feel that the repository that you just used to install the Flash 9 Beta is suspect please delete it from your sources.list using the same edit technique described in the podcast.
I must reiterate that Trevino’s repository is BELIEVED to be safe, but in any case, no offense to Trevino, adjust your repositories list according to your own level of trust. I will tell you at this point that the reason Ubuntu is secure is that they only recommend and use trusted repos meaning that they have been checked (for lack of a better word) for possible threats. So, please be wise with any new repositories that you might come into contact with and judicious in your use of them.
Well this weeks CLCOTW is not exactly a command but it is a good tip!
Just remember if you forget the spelling of the command just press the TAB key and it will either finish the command for you or give you a list of commands that start with the letters that you typed.
Ubuntu disks Available
If you would like to have an Ubuntu Dapper Disk please contact Michael Castellon, here is his email and his website address:
He has about 50 of the factory disks complete with sleeve and is willing to part with them. Thank you Michael for providing this service for my listeners.
If you are running Edgy EFt and everything is fine please leave a comment. If you installed Edgy and you had problems installing, yet managed to fix it please tell us all how you did it. You can leave a comment by clicking on the comment link at the end of this entry or you can send me an email by clicking ‘Email Me’ link on the sidebar.
This week I took printing to another level! Well…ok, maybe not another level, more like a side level. Oh alright, its not a whole level, its more like a side step. Whatever it is I thought it was useful. I setup a PDF printer on my Ubuntu laptop without using Adobe Acrobat and I let you in on the whole thing on my podcast. You can download the episode below:
a. Install cups-pdf by running sudo apt-get install cups-pdf
b. Edit the configuration file by running sudo gedit /etc/cups/cupsd.conf
c. Change “RunAsUser Yes” to “RunAsUser No”
d. restart cups by running sudo /etc/init.d/cupsys restart
e. Goto the menu System>>Administration>>Printing and add a printer
f. Select the detected printer “PDF Printer”
g. Select the Generic, Postscript Color Printer (Rev 3b)
h. Give it a name, like PDF Printer
i. Right click on the newly created printer, and select Properties
j. Click “Print a Test Page”
k. The file should be in your Home folder, under the PDF folder
Note - in some cases this method will not work because as soon as you try to add aprinter it has not detected a pdf printer. Also, when I tried to edit the configuration file there was not a line that referenced RunAsUser so I eventually added that line but it still did not work. In come the Ubuntu forums to the rescue! I got further instructions and they are outlined below:
a. Install the cups-pdf package (I used version 2.2.0-1)
b. Go to System -> Administration -> Printing
c. Doubleclick “New Pinter”
d. Notice that there is no mention of a CUPS PDF printer
e. Open a terminal and tpe “sudo nautilus” and then your password
f. Go to Filesystem -> usr -> lib -> cups -> backend
g. Rightclick “cups-pdf” and select Properties
h. Go to the Permissions tab and click the “Set user ID” special flag
i. Again try to add a new printer
j. There is now a “PDF Printer” detected, select it
k. Select the Generic, Postscript Color Printer (Rev 3b)
l. Give it a name, like PDF Printer
m. Right click on the newly created printer, and select Properties
n. Click “Print a Test Page”
o. The file should be in your Home folder, under the PDF folder
This got the printer to show up and working;) Yes!
CLCOTW - Command line command of the week: shred
shred - delete a file securely, first overwriting it to hide its contents
SYNOPSIS
shred [OPTIONS] FILE [...]
DESCRIPTION
Overwrite the specified FILE(s) repeatedly, in order to make it harder for even very expensive hardware probing to recover the data. Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options too.
-f, –force
change permissions to allow writing if necessary
-n, –iterations=N
Overwrite N times instead of the default (25)
-s, –size=N
shred this many bytes (suffixes like K, M, G accepted)
-u, –remove
truncate and remove file after overwriting
-v, –verbose
show progress
-x, –exact
do not round file sizes up to the next full block
-z, –zero
add a final overwrite with zeros to hide shredding
Here is the out put of my experiment with shred when I executed the command
