Ubuntu 9, known as Jaunty Jackalope is a satisfying distro according to many Ubuntu users and beta testers. But how to use iPhone and / or iPod? Let me show you something to make your system definitely working with iPhone and iPod.

First of all download a brand new release of Virtual box http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads or add the right repository in Software Sources section.

Install it and follow the guided procedure.

Reboot and everything should work.

What if you lost your account password?
Before you destroy your linux installation check this out:

switch on your computer, and as soon as you can, strike the Esc key on your keyboard to display GRUB menu;

highlight and select the recovery mode;

your distro will boot into a recovery shell and, after you get a console prompt, type:

user@pc:~$ passwd user

where the user is your username;

choose, enter and confirm a new password when prompted;

restart your machine:

user@pc:~$ reboot

and take a deep breath.

If you want to enable Facebook Chat for Pidgin in Ubuntu you need to install Facebook Chat for Pidgin plugin that now is included in the official repositories.

This is a Facebook chat plugin for Pidgin, it simply connects to the new Facebook Chat IM service without the need for an API key as many other services require.

Currently the plugin can log into the Facebook servers, get the buddy list, send and receive messages, add and remove friends, receive notifications and search for Facebook friends.
Moreover you can set your Facebook status too.

Now open a console session and type:

sudo apt-get install pidgin-facebookchat

insert your root password and Ubuntu will make everything itself without asking you anything else.

Let’s get into it and enjoy your facebook world!

Your computer (PC, MAC, handeld and so on…equipped with Windows, Linux, MacOS, every distro/release OS) has an Internal IP address and an External IP address.
It may have been set manually or it may have been set automatically. That doesn’t matter.
Regardless of how it was set there are times when you need to know what that IP address is.
In other words you ask to yourself: How can I find my pc IP?
The easiest way is to go to www.mypcip.net and check out the result in the top of page.
There you can also find some useful information about IT (IP, DNS, WHOIS, MAC, IPv4/6 and counting)

The easier, the better!

In every modern linux distros (OpenSuSE, Ubuntu, Mandriva, …) we use the graphic environment (GUI) almost all day.

Linux GUIs as Gnome, KDE or Enlightment, have a trash can where your erased files go when you delete them from a Desktop utility.

Now if you want to get rid of that from your console, you have to know that the trash can is only another folder in the file system structure, as you can figure out, and it is located at:

user@pc:~$ $HOME/.Trash

so you can send any file to Trash just moving them to there, as an example, lets suppose you have a file in your home directory called readme.txt and want to move it to the trash can (recycle bin if you prefer)

user@pc:~$ mv $HOME/readme.txt $HOME/.Trash/

Whenever you may want to restore it, just move the same file to the original location or to any other you like, just like the following:

user@pc:~$ mv $HOME/.Trash/readme.txt $HOME/

and you are done.

If you want to clean your trash can/recycle bin, just type this line

user@pc:~$ rm -rf $HOME/.Trash/*

and press enter in your keyboard.

That’s all!

Sometimes, it can be very useful to increase the available swap memory using a file, so we could have a memory boost in a snap without prepare a dedicated swap partition.
Let’s do it!

The following line would create a swapfile of 4 gigabytes using a blocksize of a megabyte (1048576).
user@pc:~$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=4194304 count=1000

Then make the file as a swapfile
user@pc:~$ mkswp /swapfile

Now we have to activate the swapfile…
user@pc:~$ swapon /swapfile

…and verify that the same has been activated.
user@pc:~$ swapon -s

That’s all!

If you like to try a new Linux distro (or any other OS with similar features) you can prepare a bootable USB device (stick, pen, thumb, disk and so on) and boot your system standing by for loading process completion.

Actually that is not ever easy because older PCs don’t have the proper updated BIOS support.

It doesn’t matter what kind of USB you have (1.0 or 2.0) Plop could be your ultimate solution.

That said, you can download and burn the .iso image so you won’t be in trouble if you get wrong in MBR hard drive setup.

Once the burning process has finished, just insert the cd and restart your PC then scroll down the green entry list menu and go on with USB booting process.

Now you can test any rescue USB system or live linux distro too.

Piece of cake!

I just downloaded and tried the last Ubuntu beta release (9.04 – Jaunty Jackalope)
The first package I set up was skype 2.0, everything went great except for the audio call feature.
I adopted the same solution well known for the previous distro (8.04 – Intrepid Ibex) as well as you can do following the lines below:

user@pc:~$ killall pulseaudio

user@pc:~$ sudo apt-get remove pulseaudio

user@pc:~$ sudo apt-get install esound

user@pc:~$ sudo rm /etc/X11/Xsession.d/70pulseaudio

That’s all.

Reboot the system and get free calls with skype again.

On any default Ubuntu box, any task which requires root (or Administrator) privileges runs a program called sudo (or the graphical version, gksu) to run a helper program in a privileged mode.
By default, for security reasons, this program will ask you to input your personal password. When you make many settings changes on your system (or need to run applications as root), each password prompt can get rather annoying.
This tip will show you how to configure sudo to allow a specific user to run commands as root (or any other user you define) without prompting for a password.

The sudo program saves its configuration information in the text file /etc/sudoers. So you should edit this file:

user@pc:~$ sudo nano /etc/sudoers

and add the following line:

#USER# ALL=NOPASSWD:ALL

Replace #USER# with the username of the user you wish to add. E.g. if the username was bill, insert a string like that:

bill ALL=NOPASSWD:ALL

Now you will not have to give Ubuntu the password when you use sudo.

When you set up Ubuntu or Kubuntu or some other Ubuntu-like distro, during the installation process it automatically will add the first user to the sudo group, allowing that user to make changes as the super user (aka root aka administrator if you come from Windows environment) by typing in the related password.
However, if you want to give someone else superuser privileges (please think on it) on your Linux system, you’ll have to give it a specific sudo access.

That is very easy to do. Just run:

user@pc:~$ sudo usermod -G admin username

That’s all!

If you prefer the graphic way of doing things, open System -> Administration -> Users and Groups.
Select the user you want to add to sudo, and click Properties.
Under the User privileges area, check the box “Executing system administration tasks” and you’ll be done.