Ubuntu For Free

There’s been a great rift with the Canonical Community as of late surrounding Kubuntu. The update from KDE 3.5 to KDE 4.0 is such a great shift that Canonical feels they’re unable to commit to Long Term Support for Kubuntu 8.04. Frankly, I don’ blame them. This is a pretty good move for them as far as any business relationships and future investors.

I don’t think it’s a problem. However, you kind of have to wonder how it affects the users who install using Ubuntu 8.04 and then add the kubuntu-desktop package, or will it be disabled?

Others have noted that there’s been a lack of reports from users with their experience regarding Hardy Heron. I noticed the torrent activity was kind of slacking. This is an excellent time for us to step up the testing on this. I suggest testing the .ISO image from a LiveCD and from some sort of virtualization application, such as VMWare or VirtualBox. If you’ve got the resources, it’s definitely appreciated for a full install and all the reports that you get from that experience.

I’ve encountered a few bugs that I’ve reported at Launchpad. Here I found other users reporting the same kind of problems I experienced. I wasn’t able to find the bug reports doing a simple search, instead it found them for me when I attempted to report the bugs, so go ahead and just attempt to report the bug you encounter. If it doesn’t find it for you, someone will catch it in triage. So, to re-iterate. If you haven’t tried it yet, go ahead and take the time. This is one of the easiest ways to contribute to the community.

One of the best tips I can give on using the command line to your advantage is to grab a hold of the “alias” command. You’re going to be typing a lot of commands, and with Ubuntu, through the bash shell’s glorious “alias” command, they’ll be fewer and shorter.

The alias command allows a shell user to provide their own set of alternate commands for commonly keyed instructions.

The default install of bash includes a few basic aliases, some different modifications of a regular listing of files. Try “ll” for example. While it’s not a command included in Ubuntu and no binary exists for it, the command still provides a more verbose listing of the files. That’s because bash has already defined that alias for you (unless you’ve removed it).

I use the command to make it easy to start and stop my mail server.

alias fymail='vmware-cmd /home/vmware_machines/fymail/fymail.vmx'

Afterwards,

I can use

fymail start

or

fymail suspend

It may take a little practice and some experimenting, but they save me a lot of time and keystrokes.

You’ll want them to load in your startup of course, so I suggest using

gksu gedit ~/.bashrc

to save your alias commands for future sessions.