Goto your terminal and type the following:

1. sudo apt-add-repository ppa:mozillateam/firefox-stable
2. sudo apt-get update
3. sudo apt-get install firefox

That’s it. After the big download, you will have firefox 4 installed on your ubuntu machine.

Here is an explanation of what happens.

1. You are adding the mozillateam’s stable personal package archive repository to your Software Sources.
2. You are updating your local packages for the new sources.
3. And you are installing “firefox”. Doing an apt-get install of an already installed package just upgrades it.

Bonus: Look at the cool graphics to show the live download stats on the glow.mozilla.com site.

I wanted my Ubuntu back and so searched the web for info regarding this and found one. He has given steps to first install Solaris and then Ubuntu, but this holds true the other way round too.

You would need the desktop live CD of Ubuntu for this, so that you can recover Ubuntu’s grub.

1. After booting to Ubuntu Live system, open up the terminal and type sudo grub.
2. You will get a grub prompt – here type

   find /boot/grub/stage1

3. Use this information to set the root device (this may be different for you)

   root (hd0,0)

4. Then install grub

   setup (hd0)

5. And quit

This would get back the Ubuntu’s old grub, but now you have to make an entry for OpenSolaris.

Edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst file and add this new entry at the bottom

title	Open Solaris
root	(hd0,1)
chainloader	+1
makeactive
boot

This would enable you to boot to Open Solaris too now. There were problems with my Atheros drivers as usual and I have to find a way to install the madwifi drivers as I did on my Ubuntu. If anyone got wifi working on Acer Aspire 5050 with OpenSolaris, please do leave a comment here.

After you have setup an account with NFS and setup a site, you will be given the site details – like FTP, SSH, etc. I prefer using SSH if available, as it is faster to download and install directly than to get it on my machine and uploading it again.

Just ssh to the site and download the latest wordpress tarball and untar it


$ wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
$ tar -xvzf latest.tar.gz

If you want to setup the blog at a subdirectory, just rename the ‘wordpress’ folder to something like ‘blog’. If you want it to be at the root of the site, just move all the contents of the wordpress folder to the parent directory.

Then visit your site http://your-site.nfshost.com or the domain if you have registered one.

It will guide you through the install process which is very easy. You just have to give the MySQL database details. You may need to temporarily give write permissions to the public folder, so that the installer can write a config file.

After this, login to your admin page and remember to change the password from Users menu.

Plugins

After you have your blog setup, its time to get some basic plugins installed. You can get more functionality by installing these plugins.

All you have to do is just download the zip files to the wp-content/plugins/ directory and unzip them. The plugins I have installed are:

WP-SuperCache

This caches your blog’s contents as plain old HTML, so that your server doesn’t have to process and fetch all the data from the database. Previously the install process was a bit difficult, but now it has become very easy. Just unzip and activate.

reCAPTCHA

Prevent comment spam by using CAPTCHA for your comments form, also help in converting books to electronic format.

WordPress.com Stats

Track your popular posts and other statistics by using the wordpress.com’s stats.

Google Analyticator

Google Analytics is an excellent user metrics analysis tool with bright colorful charts and best of all, it is free. This plugin asks just for your Google Analytics’ UID.

Feedburner Feedsmith

Feedburner is a great service for your RSS feeds and I have been using that for this blog for a long time. This plugin is now the official plugin and it automatically redirectly your feeds to the FeedBurner link.

These are my list of plugins. So, what are the plugins that your have?

1. First get the patched madwifi drivers from the site and extract them to some place (maybe your desktop)
2. You need to compile these drivers, so you must sudo apt-get install build-essential.
3. Then cd into that directory which you extracted recently and do a make, sudo make install
4. Then add the following two lines to this file /etc/modules

   ath_pci
   wlan_scan_sta

5. Then make sure that you disabled Atheros from System > Administration > Hardware Drivers (also called Restricted drivers management). If you don’t disable this, the modules which you added in the previous lines wont be loaded.
6. Then restart your system to find a new device named ath0 (when you ifconfig)

PS: I know it has been almost 5 months since I posted here. I am giving the (s/l)ame reason here that I was busy. I haven’t been giving much attention to this blog. If you can give some ideas or suggestions on better managing my time it would really help.

You just have to install a package called dnsmasq.

First install it by running (you need to enable the Universe repository)

$sudo apt-get install dnsmasq

Then, open this file /etc/dnsmasq.conf and uncomment(remove the #) the line listen-address=127.0.0.1

After that edit /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf and search for a line prepend domain-name-servers 127.0.0.1; and uncomment it. What this does is, whenever you get a new dhcp lease, the dhcp3 client tool on your computer gets the new lease and updates the /etc/resolv.conf file with the right values for the DNS server.

Using the prepend option, we make sure that 127.0.0.1 appears before the other DNS servers. So, if the details of a domain are already in the cache, it retrieves it fast – else it looks for the other DNS servers.

Now open /etc/resolv.conf and you can see that it doesn’t have 127.0.0.1 now.

search yourisp.com
nameserver 127.0.0.1
nameserver 192.168.1.1

The last line may be different for you. I have a router which is configured to use OpenDNS, so my entry points to it.

To check whether the cache really works, execute the following command.

$dig google.com

You will get something like ;; Query time: 252 msec

Executing the command again will get you ;; Query time: 1 msec.

Congrats, you have saved about 250msec by caching the DNS.

Here is how you too can install Emacs Snapshot on your Ubuntu.

1. First add the following lines to your /etc/sources.list file

   deb http://debs.peadrop.com feisty backports
   
   deb-src http://debs.peadrop.com feisty backports

2. Then add the GPG key to the key database.

   wget --quiet http://debs.peadrop.com/DD385D79.gpg -O - | sudo apt-key add -

3. Then update and install the following packages. These are only for the 32bit version of Ubuntu.

   sudo aptitude update
   
   sudo aptitude install emacs-snapshot-gtk emacs-snapshot-el

4. Then you have to specify which font you want to use in the Xresources file.

   echo "Emacs.font: Monospace-10" >> ~/.Xresources
   xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources

This will do the magic and now you can enjoy the cool looking emacs. And also thank Alexandre Vassalotti for the nice packages.

1. First update your system by typing in the terminal
   $ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade
2. Then you need to add a repository to your sources.list file.
   Type $ gksudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list
   Add this line to the end of the file and save it. deb http://ubuntu.beryl-project.org feisty main
3. Then type this in your terminal
   $ wget http://ubuntu.beryl-project.org/root@lupine.me.uk.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -
4. Then update your system.
   $ sudo apt-get update
5. Install the latest Nvidia drivers
   $ sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx
$ sudo nvidia-xconfig --add-argb-glx-visuals --composite
6. Restart your X by pressing ctrl+alt+backspace
7. Install Beryl and emerald themes
   $ sudo apt-get install beryl emerald-themes beryl-manager
8. You can now run beryl by typing beryl-manager in the run application box by pressing alt+f2
9. To make beryl start automatically every time you login,
   goto System -> Preferences -> Sessions
   In Startup Programs -> New add beryl-manager.

To quote the website “Flock is an amazing new web browser that makes it easier to share media and connect to other people online. Share photos, automatically stay up-to-date with new content from your favorite sites, and search the Web with the most advanced Search Toolbar available today.”

As of now you can’t install Flock through synaptic. you have to download the archive and just run it.

Download flock from the website.
Extract the archive by typing

sudo tar -C /opt -xzvf flock-*.linux-i686.tar.gz

Create a symbolic link to the executable

sudo ln -s /opt/flock flock /usr/bin/flock

Now you can run flock by typing flock or you can instead create a menu item.

sudo gedit /usr/share/applications/flock.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Flock
Comment=Flock Web Browser
Exec=flock
Icon=/opt/flock/icons/mozicon128.png
StartupNotify=true
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=Applications;Network

Then refrech the menu

killall gnome-panel

After that when you start flock it will automatically set up all your blog, photo, bookmark account and will be ready to use.

Blogged with Flock

First you have to add a few repositories to your sources.list.

In terminal type sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

Add the following repositories to the file

## E17 repository "edevelop.org"
deb http://edevelop.org/pkg-e/ubuntu edgy e17
deb-src http://edevelop.org/pkg-e/ubuntu edgy e17

You can replace edgy with dapper if you are using Ubuntu 6.06.

Then type the following lines to download the gpg keys and to add it

wget http://lut1n.ifrance.com/repo_key.asc
sudo apt-key add repo_key.asc

After the repositories are added, do a sudo apt-get update to update the packages list.

Then finally install e17 by issuing this command. sudo apt-get install e17

You have successfully installed e17 and can now logout of GNOME and again login by changing the session as Enlightenment.