I was very curious about Intrepid’s release. I just could not wait! I even pre-ordered the CD but downloaded the DVD without patience. I have not-so-fast a connection when it comes to downloading a DVD. In spite of it, I just downloaded. I even allocated HD and swap space for that and was just waiting to install it.

And what horrors!

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Installing Linux software through repositories is the safe bet. In respect with Ubuntu, there are many software in Intrepid Ibex which I feel is crap. For eg: the “Hardware Drivers” does not have drivers for older kernels. On the other hand, there are many software (like Brasero, Transmission,Totem,VLC etc.) in Hardy that needs update, which the Hardy repositories have not provided till now. To bridge these gaps, I would like to provide you all with the repositories of Hardy and Intrepid.

NOTE: Please think twice before installing software from other Ubuntu version repositories. It may screw up your installation

HARDY HERON REPOSITORIES:

I have provided the older ones and two updates, just in case for those people who will want to install the older versions of software.
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NVIDIA released their new set of beta drivers yesterday, with a version 180.04. While going through the release notes, I found this line very interesting.

Added initial support for PureVideo-like features on Linux via the new VDPAU AP.

Now I don’t know what exactly they mean by “initial support” but nonetheless its a pretty good that they (finally) decided to add PureVideo support.

In case you’re wondering what PureVideois all about, PureVideo is a decoder which offloads decoding of MPEG2 & H.264 streams over to GPU, leaving the CPU free for other tasks. Read up on PureVideo more on the wiki.

Links to the drivers: x86 / x86-64

Here’s my how-to on installing the drivers.

Do note that the drivers are still BETA.

A while ago, I’d written a post on howto mount CD images, such as .iso, .mdf files etc via the command prompt using the mount command. In the post, among the comments, Sumeet had asked if there was a way to do all of this without having to type lengthy commands. Well yes there is! And it can’t get simpler than this!

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This is my small post on how to upgrade nautilus in hardy to that version in Intrepid. As of know, the upgrade option in hardy repositories isn’t there yet. And, its true that the 2.23 version of Nautilus has tab facility like in Firefox. However, Ubuntu Hardy Heron which has Gnome 2.22 version and so doesn’t have that option.

For this reason I wanted to upgrade nautilus and kept searching for the whole day. Without hope i searched for one last time and found out exactly what i needed. The only way I know to upgrade nautilus is adding the intrepid repository in hardy.

Here’s how you can go about doing so

1. Add this repository in hardy :-

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu intrepid main restricted universe multiverse

2. Update your repository sources list 

3. Upgrade nautilus 

4. Logout and login.

There also many other packages in this repository since this is the original ubuntu repository. Optionally, you may also like to download them. Some of them include firefox,usplash theme,pidgin,gnome panel etc.

Couple of days ago, while I was updating the KDE4.0.4 install present on my openSUSE, my Internet conked off(as usual), and I was stuck halfway between the KDE4.0.4 -> KDE 4.1.3 update. So I shutdown my system. Later on while powering it on, this semi-update badly damaged by KDE installation with version incompatibilities and DBUS communication failures – resulting that my X server wouldn’t come up, with KDE chosen as the DE. With KDE out, I was trying to figure out how to get it updated, without any GUI tools(generally I rely on YaST2) and then I thought why not try out zypper

[...]

WordPress today released the first beta of WordPress 2.7 as on schedule. However the fianl release of WordPress 2.7 won’t be available on November 10, as per the schedule.

As posted on the WordPress development blog

Speaking of the final release, it will not be available on November 10th as originally scheduled.  We are two weeks behind schedule at the moment.  We need a little more time to finish the visual design, do a round of user testing against that finished design, and do a proper round of public beta testing

However they mention that they release a Release Candidate on November 10th, and that it would be a very polished, release-worthy version.
I’ve been checking it out, and looks pretty impressive indeed.

Above’s the screenshot.

Grab it from here

Bang of the release schedule, the next version of Ubuntu, Ubuntu 8.10 dubbed the Intrepid Ibex was released on October 30th.

Ubuntu Intrepix Ibex brings in some new features like

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Previously I’d posted on auto-mounting partitions at startup using pysdm. This post shows how you can do so by making use of mount command.

Below steps require root priviliges, so switch to root or prefix sudo to the commands.

For mounting NTFS drives with read and write support, open the terminal and type

mount -t ntfs -o nls=utf8,umask=0222 /dev/device_name /where_you_want_to_mount

mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/device_name /where_you_want_to_mount/

Editor’s note: ntfs has been superseded by ntfs-3g and will mount with read/write privileges. However it may happen that you’ve created a mount point which requires root priviliges for read/write access. Hence I suggest that you create a mount point for your Windows drives within your /home directory, that way you won’t be needing root priviliges

For FAT32 use:

mount -t vfat -o umask=000 /dev/device_name /where_you_want_to_mount

Replace /dev/device_name with your hard disk device partition.

Adding these options to /etc/fstab file will result auto mounting of your drives.

Editor’s note: I don’t suggest touching the /etc/fstab unless its really necessary, as fuse takes care of mounting drives perfectly
PS: If someone knows how to mount ext3 drives with read and write support and other commonly used filesystems please post it as a comment. Adding “user” to the options didn’t work for me.

Editor’s note:
For ext2/3 also, the command remains the same with few changes

mount -t ext3 -o user /dev/device_name /where_you_want_to_mount

Again as mentioned above, it may happen that you’ve created a mount point which requires root priviliges for read/write access and hence you don’t get read/write access.

Bonus tip: If you don’t mention -t option, Linux will autodetect the filesystem type.

In my previous posts I’d written on how to mount your partitions using the mount command. In the post I’d mentioned that you’d have to mention the partition that you want to mount by specifying /dev/device_name as part of the command. The question that would come to your mind is, How do I know which of my partition is on what device? So let me show how to find out which partition is on what device! [...]