e x p r e s s i c a

I upgraded the dist to Hardy Heron, the Ubuntu 8.04. And my experience with it so far has been very satisfactory.
Its much more stable now. I found various stuff already bundled which previously I had to explicitly install. For me the good things bundled…

Firefox 3

Hardy provides Firefox 3(beta) by default, comparatively its a super fast browser now. I am desperately waiting for Firfox 3 final release. Once I was a bit upset to see that the Firbug is no more compatible with Firefox3 but then I found Firebug’s release 1.2 which works fine with Firefox3. Till yet have not found any problem and both are working fine. Firefox3 is certainly quite faster.

Ruby 1.8.6

Provides Ruby 1.8.6 (patchlevel 111). Good!
The libmagick is also available but still the RMagick needs to be installed the way I posted here.

Pidgin

A one stop shop for almost all the messenger services like gtalk, aim, yahoo, irc and many more. In previous dist I had to install gaim.

This new ubuntu is operating quite faster and I am enjoying it a lot.

If you have installed ruby using apt-get or if you have not mentioned the configuration option for openssl while installing from source, you can expect openssl will not work with ruby.

Here is the solution for the same…

Step 1

Install gcc and make(if you don’t have already on your box)

  sudo apt-get install gcc make

Step 2

Install the system level OpenSSL and dev libraries

  sudo apt-get install openssl libssl-dev

Step 3

Install the ruby’s openssl interface to the system’s openssl

switch the directory to the ruby’s source code’s openssl

  cd /usr/local/src/ruby1.8.6/ext/openssl

install the ruby’s openssl interface

  sudo ruby extconf.rb
  make
  make install

try requiring the openssl in irb

  require 'openssl'

if returns true, installed successfully!

In a fresh Ubuntu, not having the locales setup, it shows warning every time while installing any software/library and while stopping/restarting as well.
You can setup the required locales easily.
The following example shows the simple steps to setup the en_IN UTF-8 locale.

Step 1

Edit or Create the file /var/lib/locales/supported.d/local and add the required local in the file as follows

  en_IN UTF-8

you can add more locales in new lines.

Step 2

reconfigure your system’s locales by issuing the command

  dpkg-reconfigure locales

Thats done!

It was ruining all my mood and concentration when i was trying some sample ruby code in irb and again and again i had to retype the things because the arrow keys were not working there. I searched the problem on net and found that i need to have readline library on my linux and in ruby as well. Now the point is readline should be available on the linux before you compile ruby so as you can give the readline option while compiling ruby. BUT we have ruby already installed !! Now What ?

Now, first you will need to install system based readline libraries as

  sudo apt-get install libreadline5 libreadline5-dev

If you are not able to install linux based readline with the above method the refer this for more details.

Now you will need to compile the ruby based readline interface to let you readline library available in irb.
Do it by this…

  cd /usr/local/src/ruby-1.8.6/ext/readline
  sudo ruby extconf.rb
  sudo make
  sudo make install

thats it, all done!!
Try your tips on arrow keys in irb, it should work now.
enjoy!!

While installing RMagick on Linux, if you are getting errors like this
“GraphicsMagick-config… no configure: error: Can’t install RMagick. Can’t find Magick-config or GraphicsMagick-config program. …”,
below is the solution for this error.

RMagick requires ImageMagick and which further requires loads of dependencies already available to get installed and work properly. I was figuring out of those all, and thank god got a quite simple and elegant way to do all that in just three commands.
First you will have to install imagemagick then libmagick9-dev and then finally you can install rmagick.

Here are the commands…

[source:ruby]
sudo apt-get install imagemagick
sudo apt-get install libmagick9-dev
sudo gem install rmagick
[/source]

Working on command line SSH is quite natural but FTP is a bit heck.
I found it hard to work on command line FTP for my godaddy account specially for removing the remote files and uploading the directories. I found the gFTP very much useful GUI based Ftp client. You can install it from the console by issuing this command…

[source:ruby]
sudo apt-get install gftp
[/source]

After successful installation we can launch the gFTP application from the menu Applications->Internet->gFtp.

We can launch the application from the command line as sudo gftp

In the GUI of gFTP we will required to provide the information of Host, Port, User and Pass… In host we need to give the IP address of the remote machine, we can do it better by adding the IP-Alias entry on the system… From the menu select System->Administration->Network … This is the Network Admin UI … Under the Hosts tab click on Add to add a new entry. Provide the IP and the unique alias.

Now in gFTP we can give this alias instead of the IP.

Hi everybody,

I have moved fully on Ubuntu FeistyFawn

There are lots of cool features in it like …. Run Application(the application launcher, hotkey alt+f2), the DesktopBar(full web and system search including files and folders, hotkey alt+f3) … and the TomBoy notes.

Use ctl+l to open explorer in specific location