With the new Intel drivers on Ubuntu Jaunty, the Compiz was prone to crash frequently. The Ubuntu developers had pushed certain Intel chipsets into blacklist, hence no compiz or the desktop effects for Intel users on Jaunty. There were a couple of workarounds to enable the compiz effects (See my post here), but they are workarounds - each one having it’s own pros and cons.
Today Ubuntu team pushed new updates, and one of the update related to the Intel graphics. The blacklist entries have been removed now, and the new Intel graphics driver works flawlessly with Compiz and the desktop effects. Waiting for this from a long time, Thanks a lot Ubuntu team!
Ashok TT - Linux, TechTalk compiz, Graphics, Intel, Jaunty
In Ubuntu Intrepid, Atheros wifi chip on my Compaq C770TU (C700 Series) didn’t work out of the box. I had to use the ndiswrapper, a wrapper for windows drivers. When I upgraded to Jaunty and saw that the wi-fi is working out of the box, Boy, I was so glad.
Today, I suspended my laptop for the first time after installing Jaunty. To my surprise, after the resume, my wi-fi stopped working. It cannot detect the wireless networks. The output of lspci still lists Atheors, indicating that the card is still being recognized by Ubuntu. I disabled and reenabled wireless, disabled and reenabled networking from the Network Manager, restarted the system a number of times but to no avail.
So I try to get help from my old friend Google, and all it gives me is a number of links where people are complaining about disabled wireless, but with no proper resolved posts. I followed most of them in vain (Loaded ndiswrapper, Installed linux-backport-modules-jaunty, Loaded MadWiFi etc) but still no result. During this process, I’ve stumbled upon a post in Ubuntu forums related to Intrepid and is about the Wi-Fi button not turning to blue when in operation.
In that post, I’ve read that in Ubuntu, we have to keep the wi-fi hotkey pressed for 5 seconds for Ubuntu to recognize the on/off routine. I wasn’t used to this because in Windows, the change was instantaneous. And when I switched to linux, I never had the need to use the Wireless button. So, I pressed the button for 5 seconds, and still no response. Another 5 seconds passed after I released the button, and my network applet showed the swirling animation of connecting to a wireless network and Voila! My wireless is working again!
I’ve spent almost two hours searching for a clear answer, and now that I found out, I can’t help feeling stupid for all those hours wasted for such a simple answer. Posting this experience here so that it may be of some help to someone!
@Ubuntu team - till Intrepid, after a resume the wi-fi worked seamlessly without any action from me. It’s great, Why did you change it to disabling the wi-fi after resume? I can’t guess what could be your reason.
Ashok TT - Linux, TT - Tips n Tricks, TechTalk Atheros, Jaunty, MadWiFi, WiFi
In order to run Aptana on Ubuntu without installing Firefox 2 or uninstalling Firefox 3, you have to install the package xulrunner from the default repositories.
sudo apt-get xulrunner
This will install XUL Runner v1.8, without which Aptana cannot run. Now download Aptana and extract it to your home directory. Open the aptana directory and create a new file, rename it as runaptana.sh. Paste the following into that file:
#!/bin/sh
MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/usr/lib/xulrunner
if [ $LD_LIBRARY_PATH ]; then
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
else
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME
fi
export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME LD_LIBRARY_PATH
/home/ashok/AptanaStudio/aptana/AptanaStudio
The above startup script not only allows to run Aptana, but it also fixes the issues of “Embedded browser not available” and “JVM Terminated”.
Aptana Studio is a very good IDE for PHP with it’s debugging capabilities. I recommend it for anyone who is looking for a good php debugger on linux. For simple coding, it might be an overkill and you may use a simple php editor, but if you do a lot of application development, Aptana’s the way to go! 
Ashok TT - How To, TT - Reviews Aptana, Jaunty, PHP, Ubuntu
The
HTML Validator extension for Firefox has been an essential tool in my arsenal of web development tools. The extension has both the W3C algorithms (HTML Tidy and the SGML Parser) implemented, and it works locally (offline) for validating web pages. It eliminates the cumbersome uploading to W3C Validator service and shows instant results of the tests, pretty fast too (The largest page loaded took less than 1/100th second).
The HTML Validator has a nice debug window which not only shows the errors & warnings, but also shows tips on how to solve the errors, including small bits of demonstration code. It provides a wholesome learning experience about HTML standards.
The HTML Validator works flawlessly on Windows based systems, but on Linux, it faces a bit of trouble especially on Ubuntu. This is due to incompatibility of the LIBC++ version used to compile the extension and the one available on our system. The following steps will make the HTML Validator work on Ubuntu systems:
1. sudo apt-get install libxul-dev
2. sudo apt-get install libstdc++5
3. sudo apt-get install libnspr4-dev
4. At the end of /etc/profile, add the following line:
“export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH/usr/lib/xulrunner/”
Then restart Firefox. If the status bar icon still doesn’t turnup, restart your X session and you’ll have the validator ready.
Ashok TT - How To, TT - Linux, TT - Tools, TechTalk HTML Validation, Jaunty, Ubuntu, Web Developer
The default Get Ubuntu page is giving links for the download of Live CDs, not the live DVDs. The direct download links for Jaunty DVD is not given anywhere else on the page… Upon a bit of googling, I found the following links:
For CD Images: http://releases.ubuntu.com/releases/9.04/
For DVD Images: http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/jaunty/release/
But the dvd link from above is a ftp download from Ubuntu’s servers and doesn’t support download resuming. I googled for more and finally found the following links useful for a resumable direct download of ubuntu dvd:
ftp://ftp.free.fr/mirrors/ftp.ubuntu.com/dvd/
http://ftp.ntua.gr/pub/linux/ubuntu-releases-dvd/9.04/release/
These links are available from the official mirrors list of Ubuntu:
http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/downloadmirrors#dvd
Only the above two links (France, Greece) are pointing to Jaunty. Rest of the links there are pointing to Hardy release dvds.
Eagerly waiting for my download to finish…
Ashok TT - Tips n Tricks, TechTalk Downloads, Jaunty, TT - Linux, TT - Tips n Tricks, Ubuntu