Exit your Bash session and open a new one and it should work now (or you can source this file again using source /root/.bashrc, just make sure you are doing all this with root privileges.)

LibreOffice 4.0 Beta 2 is currently available by default in Ubuntu 13.04 Daily Build.

It has an impressive list of new features:

• now integrates with various CMS (Content Management System)
• uses Firefox personas to theme it
• contributing to LibreOffice is easy using Gerrit
• converting non-native formats is now improved
• can edit Visio and Publisher documents

Open up LibreOffice and go to Tools->Options->Personalization. Click the Select Persona button, and in the Persona address field, enter the link to the desired Firefox Persona (e.g. this example uses http://www.getpersonas.com/en-US/persona/462094).

Default KDE 4.10 desktop in Kubuntu 13.04 Daily Build

To be honest, KDE 4.10 is really a wonderful experience. And that’s even with my low specs graphics card from Intel. I read a lot of complaints over the Internet, mainly here, but for me the experience was great. It’s good to see such a feature-rich desktop keeping improving and heading towards the right direction, at least as far as I’m concerned. But let’s see what is new in KDE 4.10 first.

First, the Plasma Workspaces received improvements. From the announcement, the “taskbar received some usability features, with a smoother look for groups or windows”. Minimized windows will be greyed out in the taskbar and now the look of taskbar entries doesn’t provide a border for each window, but only for the active one. It looks smoother indeed, at least from my perspective:

I don’t know if this is new or not, but I like the Expand group/Collapse parent group options when right-clicking on a group icon application in the taskbar. This allows you to have access to all the opened instances of that application by clicking the specific icon in the taskbar. I couldn’t find the Stack icons grouping option from this post by Aaron Seigo.

According to this bug entry, the tiling support in KWin, introduced in KDE 4.5, has been removed because of stability issues, not supporting multi-screens, conflicting issues between KDE components. Too bad, that was a useful feature.

Unfortunately, there is a feature which it seems is unavailable in KDE (KDE 3.5 had it, GNOME has it) – showing .desktop file entries with their Name field instead of the file name. I do like the plasma widget which allows you to select a custom folder and display it on the desktop (like a, hummm, regular desktop):

As you can see, the file names are shown instead of the name field. This is not a bug because it’s logical to be this way, but it does seem kind of like a misfeature. Maybe there is a workaround for this, but I couldn’t find it. Dolphin displays them the same.

In addition to KDE 4.10, Kubuntu 13.04 ‘Raring Ringtail’ comes with Linux kernel 3.8.0, LibreOffice 4.0 Beta 2, Firefox 19 and Amarok 2.7.0.

I liked how the package installer now only contains a brief description when clicking the Details buttons, instead of the raw output of apt-get that you get when installing the packages in a terminal. Firefox doesn’t automatically start after it is installed (which would be desired, since the user probably expects to run it when it first clicks on the Firefox icon in the menu), but that’s no biggie.

I also noticed some downsides – keep in mind this is a development version, not a stable one.

Dolphin received many bug fixes and improvements. Support for MTP devices has been added, the panel icons size can now be changed (?!), current directory and files can be reported to the activity manager.

“There has also been an impressive number of performance enhancements. Loading folders, both with and without previews, is significantly faster and requires less memory while using all available processor cores to be as fast as possible. Minor improvements were made to search, drag and drop and other areas.”

On a downside, choosing not to show the Up button in Dolphin is quite a bad decision. Enabling it is a few clicks away, but still that’s a useful toolbar shortcut and most of the users are used to it. Also, the view mode doesn’t seem to be persistent. It changes for the current directory but when going up the directory tree it switches back to folder view. Setting double-click to open files and folders doesn’t seem to work.

Kate, one of my favorite text editors besides Emacs, received notifications that appear at the top of the editing area. And due to the KDE coding sprint, the number of opened bugs has been reduced from 850 to only 60. Now that’s really impressive!

Konsole brings two new features which were available in the KDE 3.5 version: print screen and send signals, as well as an option to change line spacing. For the latter, go to Settings->Edit Current Profile->Advanced and change the value of the line spacing adjustment.

Okular, Gwenview, Kontact, games, and Marble also received improvements. The KDE typing tutor, KTouch, has been completely rewritten.

A little more about Gwenview. Maybe others don’t find this bothering, but it’s a pain to always see images resized to fit the window and no option to cancel this. The option is not even saved between switching images, not to mention between sessions. I hope Gwenview will get back this functionality, available back in the KDE 3.5 days.

For developers, SDK components for Plasma are now part of PlasMate, which is an IDE for development of Plasma components. You can install it in Kubuntu using sudo apt-get install plasmate. You can create widgets, themes, KWin scrips and effects, as well as runners and window switchers in languages like QtQuick, JavaScript, Python or Ruby. Starting a default widget development has all the code in place for displaying the usual Hello world text on the Plasma workspace. I think this is too easy, and may encourage even users who don’t have much programming experience in developing widgets for Plasma (or any other components).

I did experience some issues, mainly how KDE freezes for several seconds every once in a while. This seemed to appear in 4.10, I couldn’t notice these freezes in 4.8 on Mint. Sometimes it’s only Firefox, sometimes it’s the whole KDE. I’m not sure what causes it, should it be the graphics card or something else. Whatever it is, it should be fixed as it is very annoying and counter-productive.

Firefox 19.0 sometimes becomes completely unresponsive, which is very frustrating. This also happened on Mint 14 with, sometimes when I maximize it from the taskbar it will just show a blank window and then hang. This makes for a terrible experience, needing to kill and restart it manually. But I won’t jump and bash Firefox, most of the time it works perfectly, and this may not even be Firefox-related, I don’t know for sure. Still, makes me smile when seeing that Well, this is embarrasing message every time I start Firefox. Haven’t seen it in a while. This may not even be Firefox-related.

One thing I’ve noticed is that my resolution of choice is now gone. I’m using an LCD with a default resolution of 1366×768, but I normally use it at 1280×768 because it allows me to have a vertical refresh rate of 75 Hz instead of 60 Hz (which is quite useful in shooter games). In Kubuntu, the only available modes are 1366×768, 1280×1024, 1280×720 and several lower ones. More were available in 12.10.

Changing the resolution will bring many artifacts on my Intel card. Here’s how it looks:

I think this has to do with the graphics card, not Kubuntu, since changing it back to the default resolution worked fine. Logging out and logging back in fixed the issue though.

You can download the Kubuntu 13.04 daily build from here. Burn it to a DVD or a USB Flash drive and try it.

If you want to install this KDE release in 12.10, add the following backports repositories to your /etc/apt/sources.list file and perform a sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade:

In addition to this, the final artwork for the upcoming release 7.0 codenamed ‘Wheezy’ has been published too, just a few days after the Debian Installer RC1 was released. The artwork is following a light-blue pattern. You can download an archive containing the artwork from here. The package contains PNG and SVG files for the background, grub, the Debian installer, syslinux and even artwork designed for merchandising purposes (like T-Shirts, mugs etc).

According to the current Debian Project Leader, Stefano Zacchiroli, “Software freedoms and trademarks are a difficult match. We all want to see well-known project names used to promote free software, but we cannot risk they will be abused to trick users into downloading proprietary spyware. With the help of SPI and SFLC, we have struck a good balance in our new trademark policy. Among other positive things, it allows all sorts of commercial use; we only recommend clearly informing customers about how much of the sale price will be donated to Debian.”

Here are a few screenshots:

CD:

Dvd case:

Plymouth:

Grub2:

Installer:

Login wallpaper:

Wallpaper:

NeonView is a minimalist image viewer for Linux, created by TuxArena and written in C and GTK+ 3.

Below is a screenshot of NeonView in GNOME 3:

Installing Counter-Strike

After downloading and installing the game, this can be found inside the ~/.local/share/Steam/SteamApps/common directory.

This is a beta version, and it looks pretty good. I could notice that the main menu is capped at a certain resolution compared to the usual version for Windows, but the game itself seems to use whatever resolution specified by the user. As always, I’m glad to see games ported to native Linux. There was, however, a significant drop in FPS compared to the Windows version, but that may be because of the Intel drivers.

The server browser seems to work OK:

Here’s what I ended up with:

• Linux Kernel: 3.5.0-21
• Desktop Environment: Xfce 4.10
• File Manager: Thunar 1.4.0
• Terminal: Xfce Terminal 0.4.8
• Web Browser: Firefox 17.0.1
• Office Suite: LibreOffice 3.6.2
• Music Player: Banshee 2.6.0
• Chat Client: Pidgin 2.10.6

In addition to these, Mint 14 Xfce also comes with Totem movie player, GIMP image editor, XChat IRC client, gedit text editor, screenshot tool, gThumb image viewer, a document viewer, Transmission BitTorrent client, catfish find tool, a sound recorder, Xfburn burner.

The Xfce release of Mint 14 was made available a little bit over a week ago, featuring Xfce 4.10 and a classic desktop which is already familiar among users who prefer a typical interface. At a first glance not much was changed since Mint 13, but I guess this is actually expected from an Xfce user. There is a new Xfce version, 4.10, which wasn’t heavy on changes when it appeared, new kernel and up to date applications.

What I like about Mint in general is the fact that it has plenty of configuration options available. A solid mention should go for providing Flash and non-free codecs by default.

The desktop preferences allow you to change wallpaper, icons, use a slideshow for wallpapers.

Desktop compositing is available via the Menu -> Settings -> Window Manager Tweaks -> Compositor -> Enable display compositing. Compositing works really well, and I enjoy the simple and clean options without the clutter of other compositing engines.

Firefox
Firefox keeps asking whether to save or not the opened tabs when quitting it, even though I always tick the option not to ask me anymore (I really don’t understand why they refuse to fix this annoying issue). A workaround for this is to open aboug:config in Firefox and set the following entry to false:

browser.warnOnQuit

It looks to be the entry browser.showQuitWarning gets reset to true each time Firefox starts, so I left it untouched and modified the variable above, which seems to work. (http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=112076)

Pidgin is the default IM client in Mint Xfce and comes with support for many protocols, however my Facebook account doesn’t seem to work in it. Yahoo! works OK though.

Thunar
To be honest, probably the first thing I install after an Xfce installation is a file manager. Thunar is the default file manager in Xfce, small and simplistic, without support for tabs nor access to network. I understand simplicity is a thing that Xfce thrives for, but the tab support is a must in opinion, especially since it wouldn’t cut much on resources.

Sharing
Sharing is available via the Menu -> System -> Shared Folders, and then clicking on the Lock icon (“Click to make changes”). However it looks like adding folders doesn’t work properly, Mint trying to replace them with the default $HOME location. A workaround this is to just add folders in the Samba configuration file, like this:

[shared_folder_name]
path = /path/to/folder
readable = yes
writable = no

Then restart Samba using sudo service smbd restart for changes to occur.

The relatively new GIMP with a single unified window

Overall
There are small glitches here and there, and some upolished stuff. Although minor, these are worth a mentioning. Some child windows are drawn behind their parent window, with a small screen you have to move windows around a lot to get access to a window which should act like a popup since you need to access it (example: adding accounts in Pidgin). The start-up tips window cannot be moved around by pressing Alt – for example I had to take a screenshot of it by default but the screenshot application is behind the tips window so I had to use command line.

Xfce is fast and looking pretty decent and I think Mint 14 is pretty good, but the release was a little bit rushed if you ask me. Still, Mint is Mint and all the respect to the developers for providing all these separate environments in a separate ISO with Mint-specific settings and interoperability.

Download Mint 14 Xfce

Except for the eye-candy, colors may help when it comes to clarity, although some prefer the default monochrome approach. At the start of this article there is the actual code which can be copied and pasted inside the ~/.bashrc file, and which can be modified depending on each person’s preferences. If you don’t care about what it does you can just insert it in ~/.bashrc, restart your terminal and start reading some man pages to see how it looks (e.g. man man). After this part I tried to explain how this code works and how to modify it in order to get new ‘themes’.

For this tutorial we’ll be editing the ~/.bashrc file, which is a hidden file located in your home directory which gets read each time a new Bash instance starts up. Bash reads all the commands found in this file and executes them (hence the rc part, which stands for run commands).

We will edit this file and add some lines which specify certain colors for the $LESS_TERMCAP variables.

Don’t forget to reset your terminal after entering this code in order for the changes to take effect, e.g. type reset or exit and start up another shell.

This will mostly use magenta and cyan as the colors. Next, I’ll explain what these lines mean and how you can modify the colors.

As you can see, there are several variables which are assigned different values. As shown in the comments after the # sign, every one is used when needed. When text is in bold (double-bright mode), the formatting option is set to bold and the color magenta.

Let’s take, for example, the following line:

This line could be broken into this:

• the environment variable LESS_TERMCAP_md will be assigned the value to the right of the equal sign
• the right side says execute the command between the $( and ) characters, just like the older ` ` did
• printf is a command similar with C’s printf and means “print with format”. The characters between the double quotes specify a color and a font style (e.g. in this case, bold and magenta).

The part that is inside the double quotes are format specifiers like bold, regular, or color to be used. More on these can be found on Wikipedia, here.

The color codes are as follows:

• 30 – black
• 31 – red
• 32 – green
• 33 – orange
• 34 – blue
• 35 – magenta
• 36 – cyan
• 37 – white

Some other escape codes which you could use include:

• 0 – reset/normal
• 1 – bold
• 3 – italic/reversed
• 4 – underlined
• 5 – blink

You can check this by typing in a terminal something like:

So, if we have something like printf ‘\e[01;33m’ it means enter bold and color yellow, according to the listing above.

export is a Bash built-in used to assign values to variables in such a manner that any subsequent application that runs in that shell will be aware of the variable’s value. If, for example, we would simply assign a value to a variable, say MYVAR=”this is my variable” and we would then issue echo $MYVAR, we would see that the variable’s value will be printed. However, try to make a simple script which would echo it, for example:

And then run it e.g. bash myscript.sh – you will see that the value is lost, not visible in the script. So this is where export is useful, because it will make any further script or application “see” the variable. When we invoke the man command, it will need to see the values for our LESS_TERMCAP variables.

Here is another color scheme:

• http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-bash/index.html
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code
• http://www.gnu.org/software/termutils/manual/termcap-1.3/html_mono/termcap.html
• https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Man_Page
• http://tips4linux.com/color-man-pages-in-linux/

In this tutorial I will start from the basic ways of using find and head up into showing more complicated (but very useful) ways of getting the most out of it, in order to search and display exactly the results that you are looking for. The version of find that I currently have installed is 4.4.2, as it comes with Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin, and Bash 4.2.20 (older versions should work without problem too). Special thanks go to http://www.commandlinefu.com/ for some really great one-liners.

If you’re not familiar with the terminal, command-line or Linux in general I suggest you read my introductory tutorial here: Introduction to Linux Command-Line for Beginners.

The simplest way of using find is by typying it in a terminal:

find

This will list all the files and folders (including hidden ones and their sub-files and sub-folders) in the current directory, following the whole hierarchical structure. This will usually generate a long list of files and doesn’t seem to give us much. It’s exactly the same as:

find .

Where . is the currently working directory. This will list all the files and folders in the currently working directory.

It’s probably best to use a new folder somewhere in the file system to see this in effect, a folder which doesn’t have many sub-folders and files.

Moving on, let’s search for all the files that include the name profile in their filename:

find . -name *profile*

* is a wildcard that replaces any number of characters or no character. The above command searches in the current folder for the name *profile*.

find /usr/share -name FreeSans*

This will search inside /usr/share for all the files that start with FreeSans (and end in whatever characters e.g. FreeSans.ttf). I recommend using double quotes around the pattern to search for e.g. find . -name “.bash*”.

Another example:

find /usr/share -name FreeSans* | grep Oblique

So now you know how to search for a certain filename in a specific location.

Sometimes you need to ignore uppercase and lowercase and just search for text by ignoring case-sensitive. We’ll to this just by replacing -name with -iname:

find /usr/share -iname FREESANS*

find . -mtime +3 -iname *somefile*

This will search for files that were created earlier than 3 days ago.

find will return the whole path to the files that match the search pattern, so in order to get only the filename you can use the printf argument:

find /usr/bin -name "alsa*"

To get only the filename, use:

find /usr/bin -name "alsa*" -printf "%f\n"

To search for files by size, use the -size argument, for example:

find /usr -size +500k -name "*png"

This will search inside /usr for files which are equal to or larger than 500 KB and are ending in png. Another example:

find /usr -size +1M -name "*png"

Which will search for files which are bigger than 1 MB in size. Instead of the plus sign, you could use minus in order to search for files that are smaller than a specified size:

find /usr -size -10c -name "*png"

The -10c specifier tells find to only display files which are smaller than 10 bytes. Don’t forget the + or – preceding the desired filesize.

You could use a pipe and the xargs command for this:

find /usr/lib -size +2M -name "*.so" | xargs ls -lh

Notice that this will list the files in the current directory if find returns no file.

This is probably one of the most useful ways to search for some file which name you’ve forgot but you know some of the text it contains inside.

find . -name "*bash*" -exec grep -l "aliases" {} +

This will search in all the files that contain the patter bash for the word aliases. Those files that contain this pattern will be printed out.

Find top 20 largest files:

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 du -h | sort -hr | head -20

Special thanks go to http://www.commandlinefu.com/ and the following articles:

• https://www.linux.com/learn/tutorials/316404-10-tips-for-using-gnu-find
• http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-unix-find.html
• http://www.linux.ie/newusers/beginners-linux-guide/find.php
• http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/howto-recursively-search-all-files-for-words/

The game resembles an ancient warfare universe, much in the way Age of Empires series did. The new key features in this version include (from the changelog on the official website):

• a new, complete faction called Roman Republic, which comes with a new art set for buildings, units and ships
• a new combat system adding bonuses and weaknesses to units
• a new trading system, which allows you to choose which resource to be gained by a trader, available on both water and over land
• new random map scripts
• new animations for several ships, units and animals
• new AI improvements, including including a serious bug fix and performance increases
• four new music tracks and a re-done track
• many other bug fixes and minor features

Features & Gameplay
The game comes with 3D graphics using OpenGL, allowing you to zoom in/out and to rotate the image. After starting a new game only few options can be configured though, like enabling or disabling shadows, water reflections or the music. 0 A.D. features both single player and multiplayer, with the single player mode offering a skirmish-like mode, no campaigns being available at the current time. In single player you will fight versus qBot, the default A.I. used by the game. A scenario editor which can be started in-game via the Options menu is also available.

Main menu

The multiplayer mode features direct connection only, there doesn’t seem to be an Internet server, so you can either host a game or connect to another game by specifying the machine’s IP.

Starting a single player game

It can be ran in fullscreen mode or windowed mode using Alt+Enter to switch between them.

0 A.D. features a lot of maps, several factions like the new Roman Republic, Iberians, Celts or Hellenes, combat units, buildings for training new units and technologies, a trading system, and naval ships.

The gameplay is pretty much similar to the one of Age of Empires in that you gather food, stone, gold and wood, expand and upgrade your buildings and units, build up a strong army and defeat your opponent.

The new Roman faction (from the official screenshots)

Currently 0 A.D. doesn’t offer configuration options like changing the resolution, configuring keyboard shortcuts or changing the sound/music volumes. The available hotkeys are listed here.

You can use Alt+Enter to toggle between fullscreen and windowed mode, or F2 to take a screenshot in PNG format.

Installation
Instructions for installing 0 A.D. in various Linux distributions can be found here. To install 0 A.D. in Ubuntu you can use the repositories provided by the official project by issuing the following commands in a terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:wfg/0ad
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install 0ad

Then run it by typing 0ad in a terminal.

To conclude, 0 A.D. has a pretty slow development rate, but once all the remaining features are implemented it should make a great, classy, real-time strategy game. Plus, it’s completely free.

Download 0 A.D.

Liferea
Also called the Linux Feed Reader, Liferea is a full-featured news reader built in GTK, so I’d warmly recommend it for GNOME users. By default, Liferea’s interface is pretty much the same as Akregator, following the same style with a tree view to the left, and the news list and displaying widget to the right side. However it has three different view modes which change the alignment of the widgets (normal, wide and combined view modes). It supports system tray integration and has an option to disable JavaScript as well as modifying the font size.

Blam
Blam is small with a clean interface and fewer options than Akregator or Liferea. It’s written in Mono GTK and it should fit those who don’t need an application with all the whistles and bells.

RSSOwl
Written in Java, RSSOwl is a very powerful feed reader with support for RSS, RDF and Atom feeds. The first time it starts RSSOwl will show a wizard from which you can import pre-defined feeds, feeds from Google Reader or from a certain website. Being Java-based makes the interface a little slow when it comes to response time, but this is balanced by the richness of features that it provides. The latest version is 2.1.2 and you can download it from Sourceforge. The package contains the binary and you will need Java Runtime Environment or any other compatible Java virtual machine to run it.

RSSNOW
OK, so RSSNOW is a Plasma widget for KDE which can be displayed on the workspace. Some find it very useful, making it a good choice since it just stays on the desktop, providing a very basic interface, appearance configuration and global keyboard shortcut.

Newsbeuter
This one is a simple console news reader that runs in command-line mode, so it doesn’t have an ncurses interface and you have to configure it manually.

BlogBridge
Yet another Java-based feed reader, BlogBridge offers some pretty cool features and a whole bunch of configuration options.

ThinFeeder
This one is also written in Java and comes with various options.

Canto
This is based on ncurses, so it runs in a terminal. You will have to use the keyboard in order to navigate in Canto, and press Q to quit it.

Thunderbird
Thunderbird is well-known for being the email client from Mozilla, but it also incorporates a feed reader.

In addition to these, there is also Gnus Rss, a feed reader for Emacs, or Sage, a Firefox add-on with support for RSS and Atom feeds. Of course, the browser-based ones like Google Reader or Bloglines are available too and Firefox itself can handle feeds in a simple way.

There is also another one for GNOME called Straw, but it looks like it hasn’t been maintained since 2008. And Raggle, a command-line reader which also seems dead since 2005.

Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin is a LTS (long-term support) release and it will ship with Linux kernel 3.2 by default, GNOME 3.2, Unity 5.4.0, LibreOffice 3.5. According to Ubuntu Kernel Release Manager, Leann Ogasawara, as soon as new stable versions of the 3.2 kernel branch will be released, they will be included in Ubuntu. “With Ubuntu 12.04 being an LTS release, our primary focus has been on stability. As such, we chose to ship with a v3.2 based kernel and will continue to rebase to the latest v3.2.y stable kernels as they become available.”

A new Unity version, 5.4.0 will also ship in, introducing the so-called HUD (Heads-Up Display), well-known from shooter games. To invoke the HUD press the Alt key.

Unity 5.4.0 features the new HUD:

In KDE applications:

The user can use the HUD to explore bookmarks and history in Firefox, search in application’s nested menus, and launch various applications. The real utility of the HUD is probably the possibility to explore menu options in a fast manner by using the keyboard only. Integration seems pretty nice, this definitely being an important addition to Unity. The video below is descriptive enough.

It looks like there are some opened bugs on HUD right now, like searching the wrong application or having to click the search field when invoking HUD, but these should be fixed by the time 12.04 gets out.

A video showing the features of HUD is available for some time now on YouTube:

According to this announcement, RC6 will be enabled by default on systems with the Sandy Bridge architecture used by Intel. RC6 is a technology which allows the system to enter in power-saving mode when the GPU is idle.

Other new stuff include a new sound theme and a new version of Transmission, 2.5, which is the default BitTorrent client in Ubuntu.

12.04 will also the first Ubuntu release to be supported five years on both desktop and server, contrary to the previous LTS releases which were supported three years on the desktop and five years on the server.