shawncassick  dot  com

Well first step is to make sure you have Wine installed (if you do not have it installed just type ‘sudo apt-get install wine‘ in your terminal) and it is the latest version. You can check it by opening up the terminal and typing ‘wine –version‘, or if you just want to make sure it is always updated you can add it to the repos by typing ‘sudo wget http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/sources.list.d/hardy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/winehq.list‘ in the terminal. Once you have that taken care of we can move onto the subject at hand.

Now open up that terminal and get ready to check out Google Chrome.

Step One:

Download and Install WineTricks and it’s Dependencies:

wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks
sudo cp winetricks /usr/bin
sudo chmod +x winetricks
winetricks riched20 riched30 flash allfonts

Step Two:

Download the Chrome Installer:

wget http://gpdl.google.com/chrome/install/149.27/chrome_installer.exe

Step Three:

Open Google Chrome.Desktop in Gedit:

sudo gedit

Once the editor is open just drag and drop the desktop icon into the text area and it should load something similar to this:

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Google Chrome
Exec=env WINEPREFIX=”/home/memstat/.wine” wine “C:\\windows\\profiles\\memstat\\Local Settings\\Application Data\\Google\\Chrome\\Application\\chrome.exe”
Type=Application
StartupWMClass=Wine
Path=/home/memstat/.wine/dosdevices/c:/windows/profiles/memstat/Local Settings/Application Data/Google/Chrome/Application
Icon=c3e0_chrome.0
GenericName[en_US]=

All you need to do now is add “–new-http –in-process-plugins” to the end of the launch command so it now looks like this:

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Google Chrome
Exec=env WINEPREFIX=”/home/memstat/.wine” wine “C:\\windows\\profiles\\memstat\\Local Settings\\Application Data\\Google\\Chrome\\Application\\chrome.exe” –new-http –in-process-plugins
Type=Application
StartupWMClass=Wine
Path=/home/memstat/.wine/dosdevices/c:/windows/profiles/memstat/Local Settings/Application Data/Google/Chrome/Application
Icon=c3e0_chrome.0
GenericName[en_US]=

Obviously “memstat” will be replaced with your user name.

Now save the file and then go to your desktop and launch the icon and see what Google has been working on.

~ Enjoy!

Well Twitter seems to be popular now, and it’s documented that you can use it via terminal if CURL is installed.  The below is how to install CURL and be able to ‘tweet’ from your terminal.  Obviously you will need a Twitter account.

Step One:

Install CURL by opening the terminal and run the following command:
sudo aptitude install curl

Step Two:

Make a new text file with your settings:
sudo gedit /usr/bin/twitter

Step Three:

Place the following code into the newly formed file:

curl –basic –user “yourusername:yourpasswd” –data-ascii “status=`echo $@|tr ‘ ‘ ‘+’`” “http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json” -o /dev/null echo Message Sent!

You will need to replace “yourusername:yourpasswd” with your twitter username and password, save the file, and exit the text editor.

Step Four:

Make the file executable. In the terminal run:
sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/twitter

To use type : ‘twitter WHATEVER YOU WANT TO POST TO TWITTER‘ in the terminal and see it posted straight to your Twitter page.

Although it is tested in Ubuntu, it should work on all distros.

Well I stumbled across this thanks to my buddy Vo. It is a python script that works the same as the pizza tracker on the Domino’s website. Long story short here is the link to download it -> dominos.py <- Now onto how to use it.

Step One:

Obviously download the script above (right click, save as) or use a wget:
wget http://random.noflashlight.com/scripts/dominos.py

Step Two:

Make the script executable. Run the following command in the terminal;
chmod +x dominos.py

Step Three:

Order a pizza from Domino’s, then execute the script from the terminal;
./dominos.py ‘your phone number here’

Be sure to keep running the script periodically for the real time status:

* When the pizza is being made.
* When the pizza is in the oven.
* When the pizza is cooked and waiting.
* When the pizza is on its way.
* When the pizza was delivered.

Also you can always use this for some other fun but we won’t go into that right now, that’s a whole new post and a possible 2600 article :).

Well another nice tidbit I picked up from searching the web for the Compiz update I found a way to update my Pidgin and Firefox without having to compile the latest one each time until Ubuntu adds it to the repositories. Since Ubuntu comes with Pidgin 2.4.1 and Firefox 3.0 Beta5 by default (as of now the Ubuntu repositories have Firefox 3.0 RC1, but who doesn’t always want the latest Firefox). Here are two repositories you can add that will always contain the latest versions of Pidgin and Firefox.

Step One:

Add these two lines to ‘/etc/apt/sources.list‘ :

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/pidgin-developers/ubuntu hardy main
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/mozillateam/ubuntu hardy main

Step Two:

Fire up the terminal and run the two following commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
apt will give a warning about unauthenticated packages, but its safe, don’t worry.

Now your Pidgin and Firefox will be updated.

Enjoy!

Being how I am, I wanted to install all the new little effects that come with Compiz 0.7.6. Well after stumbling around the net I found a few little tidbits (https://launchpad.net/~compiz/+archive) and this is how I managed to install Compiz 0.7.7 (yes .7 not .6, which I personally thought was odd but cool) on my Ubuntu 8.04:

Step One:

Add these two lines to ‘etc/apt/sources.list‘ :

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/compiz/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/compiz/ubuntu hardy main

Step Two:

Fire up your terminal and type these 2 lines in, one after the other obviously:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install compiz compiz-gnome

Step Three:

Restart, and then make sure you load the ‘Fusion Icon’ it is located under Applications->System Tools->Compiz Fusion Icon. Best bet is to set it to load as a startup item (see bottom of post to learn how to do this), the command to load it is ‘Fusion Icon‘.

And there you go, load up the CCSM (CompizConfig Settings Manager), set up your preferences and enjoy!

Well the ‘mint experiment’ didn’t pan as I had hoped since the only nice thing about it is that it comes with envy. Well ‘Hardy Heron’ came out a few days ago, I decided to go for a clean install and so far there are many improvements especially in stability. Everything installed cleanly and nicely. The apps always nice, one gripe though, it comes with compiz installed but you have to apt-get the manager for it to configure it. If it has the software preinstalled then shouldn’t the program to configure it come also by default…I dunno makes sense to me. Other than that a major improvement to ‘Gutsy Gibbon’ in my opinion.

Well my first impressions are looks like a mac sorta’, installs clean, works nice, it’s grub has a stupid wallpaper that makes you look like a mint whore, but if you like ubuntu and want something else with some more driver support off the bat, check it out. it just reminds me of Ubuntu laid out a little different.

Well as the sub-text to the title sort of says this is a bit of a documentation of finding the perfect OS amongst other stuff. As I was downloading Gentoo 2008 Beta 1, my friend was installing Gentoo 2007. Well after it started we learned one plus and one minus. The plus : smaller install CDs with source code, the minus : takes forever (reported 2days to compile gnome) to compile the software, nice it almost customizes it for you, but still…that is too damn long for an OS.