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I got round to trying an installation of Ubuntu 10.04 today from my trusty USB stick. The install went smoothly and quickly (except for a problem with having two HDDs in this machine, with the OS on the second drive – remember to customise the boot options to boot from the right hard disk in this case, d’oh!).

On first boot, the most noticeable thing was the updated loading screens and reduced boot time. It wasn’t a slouch before, maybe taking 45ish seconds, but now taking 25 seconds between finishing the POST and giving me a login screen (I’ll time the laptop before and after when I upgrade that and produce a better comparison). It feels nice and fast.

Next, the wireless – works a treat, as usual. Then the proprietary graphics drivers, and the only essential reboot (having only today had a VPN client upgrade on a Windows system I have the misfortune of using with a total of five reboots necessary in the process).

Next, upgrade everything when prompted – only took a couple or minutes. Then, added in most of the packages I use that I can get out of the standard repo – that took a while, but it is 180 packages (incl. dependencies).

Finally, the other standout feature is the social network integration. The usual user identity graphic in the menu bar is replaced with a widget that looks identical but connects to my Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Yahoo Messenger accounts. So far, I’ve posted up a couple of updates from there, but I’m not sure what else it can do just yet. The other option under this widget, ‘Ubuntu One’, provides the ability to synchronise some of your user settings to the cloud. Nice idea – but as an Android user, I wonder whether I can sync my phone info with my desktops?

A bum note though – the default theme is a little dark, and moves the window maximise/minimise/close buttons to the left hand side of the window, also known as the wrong side! Quick fix – System > Preferences > Appearance: Choose the New Wave theme to brighten things up slightly and put the controls back where they belong.

Anyway, all done in no time at all – it’s hard to see how they could make it any easier!

Paul Brabban Ubuntu

Linux distributions tend to come as ISO images – files which are images of CDs/DVDs. I’ve always burned the images to a disk to install, but I’ve been meaning to try setting up a bootable USB stick instead.

Better for the environment, right? More importantly, I never seem to have a blank CD knocking about when I decide to do an install.

I expected some hassle, but it turns out to be trivial if you’re already on a Ubuntu machine, so long as your BIOS supports booting from USB devices. So…

• Check the computer you want to install into supports booting from USB; if it doesn’t I guess you’re stuck with the CD option
• Slap a USB stick with 2GB space or more in a slot on another Ubuntu machine (make sure there’s nothing on the stick you’ll miss if it gets lost!)
• Start up usb-creator from the command line (just type usb-creator, or sudo apt-get it if it’s not installed)
• Choose the .iso in the usb-creator utility
• Choose the target USB device
• Wait while files are copied and stuff
• Pull out the USB stick when it’s ready, plug it into your target machine and reboot.

The familiar installer screens should start up.

More details here.

Paul Brabban Ubuntu Ubuntu

Getting stuff to work from the Ubuntu Menu is pretty straightforward, but I ran into some little problems that confused me with Matlab. This post goes through the steps and difficulties I had, which might be useful in general, not just in relation to Matlab.

First up, I installed the Student Edition of Matlab (currently R2009a and a steal at the student price), taking into account the fact that I’m running a 64-bit OS and the student edition doesn’t come with the 64-bit architecture libraries. Pretty confusing on first install as the installer detects the architecture but then can’t find the libs, but corrected using this guidance on the Mathworks website.

Once you’ve done that, you need to pass the argument ‘-glnx86′ to Matlab every time you start it up.

That’s a pain, plus the other boilerplate to run it in the background – so I tried to set up a menu option using ‘Main Menu’, which is the relevant administrative tool that comes with Ubuntu. It’s in System – Preferences – Main Menu if you’ve not used it before. Here’s a screenshot of it, set up with a Matlab launcher.

The obvious thing is to give Main Menu the command that works from the command prompt, but no. Doing this results is strange behaviour where the splash screen fires up, disappears, and nothing. Checking the .xsession-errors log file in my home directory shows what’s happening. The application is launching in command line mode, writing its prompt to stdout, and then being shut down.

Kinda weird, maybe, as launching the app from the command line launches the Matlab GUI. Anyway, you also need to also add a ‘-desktop’ argument to the launcher command. My Matlab is installed in /opt/matlab, remember to change the path as appropriate for you.

You can also add the icon if you want by clicking where the Matlab icon is shown above, browsing to wherever you installed Matlab then into the ‘X11/icons’ directory, where you’ll find a number of icons.

Now you can launch the program from Main Menu, or drag-dropping it onto a panel, onto your desktop – wherever you like.

Paul Brabban Ubuntu, matlab matlab, MSc