Solved: Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) boot up resolution

After installing the proprietary NVidia drivers for my graphic card, the boot screen resolution has changed to 640x480. It didn't look good at all the with the nice splash screens provided by plymouth. To resolve the problem I have added the following two lines to /etc/default/grub

GRUB_GFXMODE=1680x1050
GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=1680x1050

To activate the settings, use

sudo update-grub

Here the 1680x1050 is my screen resolution.

To select a nice splash screen, use

sudo update-alternatives --config default.plymouth

That's all

Ubuntu 10.04 Released

This is my first post from the newly installed Ubuntu 10.04. So far I love the look and feel of the new version.

Ubuntu 9.04 Hangs on Shutdown/Restart

After updating my Ubuntu(Jaunty) kernel image to linux-image-2.6.28-13-generic, the shutdown and restart started to hang. I have spent many hours scratching my head to find a solution. In general, such things occur when shutdown process cannot terminate a running process properly. In my case it was caused by wicd network manager. I had to uninstall wicd and install the native gnome-network manager. Now the restart and shutdown works like a charm.

For other causes this article may provide some useful information.

How to access gui apps. on a remote server using ssh

If you would like to access gui applications such as firefox, gnome-terminal or anything else on a remote server, try the following command.

ssh -C -X user@host gui_command

Replace the user, host and gui_command with the appropriate information.

Example

$ssh -C -X john@231.32.23.34 gnome-terminal

Install the latest stable Ruby and Rails on Ubuntu 9.04

Install the prerequisite packages using the following command.

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential libssl-dev libreadline5-dev zlib1g-dev

Install Ruby
Download the latest version of ruby

$ wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/stable-snapshot.tar.gz

Untar the package

$ tar xzf stable-snapshot.tar.gz

Compile and install

$ cd ruby/
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

Create a symbolic link to ruby

$ sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/ruby /usr/bin/ruby

Install RubyGems

$ wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/56227/rubygems-1.3.3.tgz

Compile and install

$ tar xzvf rubygems-1.3.2.tgz
$ cd rubygems-1.3.2
$ sudo ruby setup.rb

Install Rails

$ sudo gem install rails

Linux Link

I found this interesting link and thought of sharing with all linux fans. It is basically a collection of all the important linux related sites.

Happy Surfing!

Distro Updates

I have finished configuring all my freshly installed distros. Apart from Windows XP I have added SuSE 10.0, Ubuntu, Mandriva 2006 and Debian in different partitions. Although I tried to share one /home partition among several distros it gave lot of compatibility issues. Therefore instead of sharing /home I have added it as an extra partition which is accessible from all linux varients.

SuSE10
Perhaps it was only me but the latest of SuSE gave me couple of problems in the beginning. Especially accessing mirrors to add additional reposiories was a nightmare till now. Hope this will be corrected soon. Good side of it was improvements in hardware recognition. Unlike previous versions this detected my tv card (Haupaug PVR250/350).

Mandriva 2006
Installation was smooth. Boot up speed was improved tremendously. Improvements done to software installation tool was pretty good. No more server connection errors. List of software available is amazing.

Ubuntu 5.10
So far the best distro I could hold on to. Installation was smooth and no difficulty installing new software.

Syntax highlight for VIM

Vim is a very powerful, fully featured, lightweight editor based on Vi. When I started running it on SUSE93, it was found out that the syntax highlighting feature was not available and should be configured manually. However it is very easy to activate this and if you follow the following steps you will be able to activate the feature in 1 minute.

Steps
1) ~>cd /home/user (Open the terminal and goto your home/user directory(change the "user" to relavent user name) using "cd". If you just opened the terminal you are most probably in home directory.)

2) ~>vim .vimrc (Open a new file called .vimrc(don't forget the dot))

3) press "i" to insert and add "syntax on" (without the the quotes)

4) press escape button and type :wq and press enter to save the file and escape.

When you open a programm file with Vim next time you should be able to see the syntax highlights.

Goodluck!