Tweetdeck on Xubuntu Not Opening Your Default Browser

I am a big fan of  Xubuntu. It is the only OS that I run. I use TweetDeck to keep up with people on Facebook and Twitter.
I started using Chromium Browser some time ago.
Once I decided that I wanted Chromium Browser to be my only browser, I removed FireFox. (Sorry Mozilla, I prefer Chrome.)
This created a problem
Now when I click any links in TweetDeck, nothing happens. Previously the links would open up in Firefox. hmmm.... That kinda sucks.
So I searched all of the internets and was not able to find an answer that worked.
But I did finally fix the issue, and here is how I did it.
First, I searched my laptop to make sure that there were no Firefox files left over.
Happy with the results, I ran the following commands.

cd /usr/bin
ln -s chromium-browser firefox

This basically creates a shortcut to chromium-browser called firefox.

I then clicked a link in TweetDeck and voila... a new tab opened up in Chrome displaying the link I clicked on and I am now a happy camper.

Given the simplicity of the resolution, this should also work with Ubuntu and Kubuntu.

Hope this helps you as well.

Android SDK, NDK, Eclipse, and ADB Auto-Installer (Ubuntu / Linux Mint)

Android SDK, NDK, Eclipse, and ADB Auto-Installer (Ubuntu / Linux Mint)

Setup your Ubuntu workstation for Android Development.

Quick and easy steps. Works quite well.

Yoono - Twitter Facebook MySpace LinkedIn Flickr - Share and Download Youtube videos

Yoono - Twitter Facebook MySpace LinkedIn Flickr - Share and Download Youtube videos

All in one messaging Client for Linux, Windows and MAC.

Easy to setup and easy to use.

Be sure to check it out.

Pithos — A Native Pandora.com Client for Linux

Pithos — A Native Pandora.com Client for Linux

As a Linux user and a fan of Pandora, this is pretty cool. Small, Simple and it just works. Couldn't ask for much more than that.

Learn the DD command

Learn the DD command

This post is full of some incredibly useful information. I ran across this looking up a simple dd command to image a hard drive. This shows that dd has a multitude of uses, not only on Linux, but for Windows too.

Adventures in linux

I am an Ubuntu fan. More specifically, Xubuntu, which uses XFCE instead of the more popular Gnome or KDE. I'm not a Gnome or a KDE hater, XFCE looks a lot like Gnome in my opinion. It just doesnt't have all the bells and whistles that Gnome or KDE has. I think I liked KDE so much, because since DOS 6.22 had gone away, I had become used to the look and feel of the Windows Environment and KDE was very much like Windows. KDE was great, it had many bells and whistles, and was just fun to use.

When I first started in Linux, I had become bored with Windows. It no longer held any attraction for me. So I was taught on Gentoo. A very powerful distro. Highly customizable, and if you knew what you were doing, optimized specifically for you hardware. This same thing can also be said for pretty much most of the distro's out there. I learned a lot diving head first into Gentoo, with the assistance of a very patient friend.

After several months, I was very efficient with the install process. My problem (which was myself) was I like to tweak and change things. This caused me many, many, many late nights reinstalling. But, I learned a lot about Linux in the process, and had a lot of fun doing it.

After about a year, I decided to start playing around with other distros. I liked the way a lot of them looked, SUSE was nice, but not for me, Mandriva, I wasn't crazy about. Slackware, scared the devil out of me. CentOS and Fedora where cool, but still not for me.

After downloading and burning and testing 30+ different live cd's, I ran across Ubuntu 5.04. It was awesome. This is the distro I used to completely rid my home of Windows. I could do everything I needed to and all of it was done in linux, and if I couldn't, well, I just got over it. It was usually something trivial anyway.

It became even more awesome when I learned about Kubuntu.
Being that I was a big fan of KDE, Kubuntu rocked. And that is what I used until I bought my first netbook. The ASUS EeePC 701. This little experiment shipped with a 4 Gig SSD as the internal drive. Kubuntu just wouldn't fit. After several google searches, I ran across XFCE. Lightweight, efficient and minimal. This led me to Xubuntu, which I believe is perfect for a netbook.
All the power of Linux, without the overhead of some of the more popular desktop environments. It was a good match for a netbook.

I still use Xubuntu to this day, why, it just works. I don't need all of the eye candy, and eye candy may look good, but I think it overpowers a lot of the netbooks. I like to be able to use my resources, not wait for the computer to catch up to me.

While I am pretty sure that my current netbook, the Samsung NC10, can handle the eye candy, I just don't want to give up the resources for it.

Do I hate Windows, not really, I still use it on my laptop issued to me from work. I don't complain about it (not very much anyway) , I just want everything to work when I turn on my computer. While no OS is perfect, you just may be missing out by not giving linux a spin. Most of the distro's are free, support can be found in many forums, and there are tons of people willing to lend a helping hand.
I think that Linux is considerably more user friendly now than it ever was. Go ahead, give it a try.

A good place to start is here:
http://distrowatch.com/
You can find the most popular versions with links to download.
Or if you need a distro to perform a specific task, whether it be audio editing, video editing, or security, there is a distro for that too.
So what are you waiting for, dive in and give it a go.

Enjoy.

Linux and SSH

Sometime ago I built myself a media server. This is a Linux box running Xubuntu and setup to stream media to the XBox 360, the Western Digital Media Player and connected to the audio in on the stereo. I searched and searched for a good howto so I could setup VNC on my server so I could control the media player. In this instance, GMusicBrowser, just because it is light weight and quick.

Then it dawned on me.... What am I doing??? I could use ssh and X11 forwarding. 

So that is what I did. 

I already had opensshserver installed on my server. X forwarding is enabled by default. So no config to mess with. 

Just simply log into the server using a command such as this:
ssh -X username@192.168.1.12 (Note that is a capital "X")

Then while connected just type in the name of the app you want to run. In this example it was gmusicbrowser. The app opened up on my local laptop and the output went to the stereo. 

That was all it took.

Here is how you can accomplish the same thing.

Once you have Ubuntu installed and patched, run this command:

sudo apt-get install tasksel

Followed by 

sudo tasksel

When you run tasksel you will get a box opened up in your shell. 

Using the arrow keys scroll down to openssh server.

Select this by pressing the space bar.

Then tab to OK and press enter.

This will install the needed packages to make your Ubuntu computer accept ssh connections.

This is all you need to do. Then you can go to your other computer and connect using a command just like the once I used above. 

ssh -X username@192.168.1.12

If you have a firewall enabled you will need to make sure that port 22 is open to allow your ssh traffic to your server.

That's it, you're all done and ready to run some apps.

Linux file copies

I frequently use external USB drives to transfer large amounts of data from my laptop to my server. I find it is faster than using my wireless network. While doing all of these transfers, I soon learned that file copies finish faster when through the CLI. Why you ask, I don't really know, I assume it has something to do with the overhead of the desktop environment, but that is just a guess.
So I start my copy session, it may be music, movies or ISO's, just whatever data I feel like messing around with that particular day. I used this command:
cp /path/to/data/* /path/to/destination
This works great, for all the files in a folder, it does not however copy subdirectories or the contents of the subdirectories. To copy this, we need to add the -R switch to our copy command. It now looks like this:
cp -R /path/* /destination/
This looks and works better, until you move your laptop to the other side of the room and forget to move the USB drive along with the laptop, oops, I just disconnected my drive during a copy...
Now what, delete the folders from the destination and start over, that is what I used to do, then I learned some helpful switches, now my copy commands look like this:
cp -uRav /path/* /destination/
All of the switches are important here, the "u" tells the copy command that it should only copy over the destination file if the source is newer or the destination file is missing, the "v" is verbose, so you can watch the file list scroll up the screen while the copy process is working. The "a" is for archive, this makes sure that the destination has the same attributes/permissions/ownership as the source file.
Just another lesson learned.

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Ubuntu and Updates

I was talking to another Ubuntu user today and realized that I sometimes do things that others may find useful. In this particular instance, Ubuntu updates. There are a couple of ways to apply updates to your system. You can go the GUI route and use the update manager, or Synaptic Package Manager, or you can use the CLI commands. I have been using Linux as my primary OS at home for several years now. I am by no means an expert, but I do know my way around the CLI. The sequence I used to go through to apply updates to my system was to open a console and start typing away. At first I would run each command individually. So I would run the following commands:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade -y
sudo apt-get autoremove -y
sudo apt-get clean
The 1st command will update the package list with new versions of the packages available.
The 2nd command will actually apply the updates to the system.
The 3rd command will remove any packages that were left behind after removing a package.
The 4th command will remove all of the downloaded files that were needed to apply the updates.
You can look in /var/cache/apt to see how many different packages have been downloaded. This is a wise thing to do if you consistently run low on disk space.
After a while, I learned I could type in a long string of commands to accomplish the same thing, it looked like this:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade -y && sudo apt-get autoremove -y && sudo apt-get clean
While this will provide the same results as running the commands individually, I then made the process a bit easier. This is how:
I created a file called updateme in my home folder, if using the CLI you can do this:
touch updateme
This will simply create the file. Once the file is created, you then edit the file with your favorite editor, in my case, nano.
nano updateme
You then take the 4 commands shown above and copy them into the file.
Now we need to make the file executable. To do this we run this command:
sudo chmod 755 updateme
You can now execute the file by running this command:
./updateme
If you regularly forget to type in ./ in before the command you can do this:
cd into /bin
Then run this command:
ln -s ~/updateme
This will create a shortcut to updateme in the /bin folder. Now that the shortcut is in /bin, all you have to do to run the file is type in the name like so:
updateme
I decided I like this method and use it an all of my Ubuntu systems, it saves time and keystrokes, and prevents you from forgetting any steps, like removing the cached files after each round of updates.
I understand that this may not be the absolute correct way to do this, but this demonstrates one of the greatest aspects of linux in my opinion, multiple ways to pretty much accomplish everything.
I hope you find this information helpful, if you see something that can ease the process a bit more, drop a comment and let me know.

Thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed it.

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