February 2013

The following articles below were published during the month of February 2013 (times are based on UTC):


Congratulations to the new moderators of Askubuntu!

Written by Nitin Venkatesh on Feb. 20, 2013, 4:45 a.m.

We offer our hearty congrats to the three new moderators of Askubuntu! A special shout-out to the two of them, who are our very own members - Roland Taylor and Barneedhar Vigneshwar :D Congratulations once again guys! And may the force be with you!


LibreOffice 4.0 has FINALLY come to 13.04

Written by Roland Taylor on Feb. 19, 2013, 11:20 a.m.

Testers fire your updaters! LibreOffice 4.0 is now officially available in 13.04. I have not yet installed it it (so no screenshots or experience to share yet), but as soon as I can I'll be sharing about it.


Installing uTorrent Server on Ubuntu

Written by Nitin Venkatesh on Feb. 18, 2013, 2:46 a.m.

Recently one of my friends shifted to Ubuntu and couldn’t install uTorrent Server. One note, folks, please always paste the full error message that you receive, there’s a reason why that error popped on your screen; so that you can fix it! Okay, so here goes: Download uTorrent Server . I am going to assume that the path where the file is stored is in ~/Downloads. Now open up a terminal, and navigate to the Downloads folder. nits@excalibur:~$ cd ~/Downloads/ nits@excalibur:~/Downloads$ ls -l utorrent-server-3.0-ubuntu-10.10-27079.tar.gz -rw-rw-r-- 1 nits nits 1561244 Feb 18 12:36 utorrent-server-3.0-ubuntu-10.10-27079.tar.gz Extract the package, and switch to the extracted directory nits@excalibur:~/Downloads$ tar -zvxf utorrent-server-3.0-ubuntu-10.10-27079.tar.gz utorrent-server-v3_0/ utorrent-server-v3_0/webui.zip utorrent-server-v3_0/utserver utorrent-server-v3_0/docs/ utorrent-server-v3_0/docs/style.css utorrent-server-v3_0/docs/Changes.txt utorrent-server-v3_0/docs/ut-logo.gif utorrent-server-v3_0/docs/Server_Changes.html utorrent-server-v3_0/docs/Server_Changes.pdf utorrent-server-v3_0/docs/license.txt utorrent-server-v3_0/docs/Server_Changes.txt utorrent-server-v3_0/docs/uTorrent_Server.pdf utorrent-server-v3_0/docs/footer_ut_address.gif utorrent-server-v3_0/docs/uTorrent_Server.txt ...


Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS released

Written by Howard Chan on Feb. 16, 2013, 6:17 a.m.

Posted on the ubuntu-annouce mailing list, by Colin Watson, Ubuntu Release Team, February 14, 2013, 20:02:50 UTC The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS (Long-Term Support) for its Desktop, Server, Cloud, and Core products, as well as other flavours of Ubuntu with long-term support. To help support a broader range of hardware, the 12.04.2 release adds an updated kernel and X stack for new installations on x86 architectures, and matches the ability of 12.10 to install on systems using UEFI firmware with Secure Boot enabled. As usual, this point release includes many updates, and updated installation media has been provided so that fewer updates will need to be downloaded after installation. These include security ...


Ubuntu 12.04.2 and Kubuntu 13.04 Alpha 2 testing needed.

Written by Howard Chan on Feb. 11, 2013, 10:02 p.m.

As the release date for Ubuntu 12.04.2 and Kubuntu 13.04 Alpha 2 draws near, it is time to get these images tested! Go to the ISO QA Tracker and select either Precise 12.04.1 or Raring Alpha 2 to start testing images!!! There were and are some sessions to help you started: 11th February, 2013 (Monday) 18:00-19:00 UTC Nicholas Skaggs (balloons) was at #ubuntu-quality on irc.freenode.net and also on Ubuntu on Air! to demonstrate the process of going through the testcases. The Google+ Hangout video is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOkbMiyJIbI 13th February, 2013 (Wednesday) 13:00-15:00 UTC Howard Chan (smartboyhw, aka me) will be at #ubuntu-classroom and #ubuntu-classroom-chat on irc.freenode.net to host the finale of a series of QA Team Classroom sessions. It ...


LibreOffice has a new website, and I need a new jaw.

Written by Roland Taylor on Feb. 8, 2013, 11:53 a.m.

I dropped my jaw on the floor... does anyone have a new one? I won't say much more other than: Check. This Out. Look out for details about LibreOffice 4.0 in the real world in the coming weeks, when it hits 13.04 I'll sure be jumping on it.


No more systray: It's dead Jim.

Written by Roland Taylor on Feb. 7, 2013, 6:41 p.m.

After holding out for a full two years (since 11.04) when Unity was made the default Desktop Environment, what was promised to happen in Unity with relation to the legacy systray has final happened. It's dead. Door nob dead... Well, sort of. As of the latest update to Unity (today, Feb 7th) in 13.04, the system tray (and the dconf value that enabled it) are no more. Unity will as of now only display application indicators, which means greater consistency, but in some cases, less compatibility. For example, Guake, the drop down terminal that so many love, no longer shows a system tray icon in Unity even with the system tray having been enabled before. However, this will eliminate some ...


Finding the exact selectors to change CSS behavior

Written by Nitin Venkatesh on Feb. 5, 2013, 6:53 a.m.

If you’ve had to work with Bootstrap, or have had to tweak some CSS in some other person’s code (or maybe yours) and have a tough time finding out the exact selector to apply the new CSS to, welcome :) Although you can use your web browser’s in-built development tools, I prefer using Firebug and will be using that in this post. Okay, so for example’s sake I am going to change the color of the navigation bar that Bootstrap offers from black (I am using navbar-inverse) to a purplish gradient and the active element of the navbar to use orange – Ubuntu colours! YAY! Now, open up the page in your web browser and hover your mouse over the ...


PHP script to dynamically generate links to the files present in current directory

Written by Nitin Venkatesh on Feb. 5, 2013, 6:46 a.m.

If you’re like me, you have a bunch of symbolic links in your webroot (/var/www) and it’s getting tough to keep a track of all the things hosted on your local machine – locations, link names, etc. I am merely documenting(and explaining) how I found a solution to this problem. Code – /var/www/index.php: <?php $dir_open = opendir('.'); while(false !== ($filename = readdir($dir_open))){ if($filename != "." && $filename != ".."){ $link = "<a href='./$filename'> $filename </a><br />"; echo $link; } } closedir($dir_open); ?> Code Explanation: $dir_open = opendir('.'); The opendir() is very much similar to the cd command in Linux/Unix based environments. It puts the mentioned directory into perspective. So in our example, the variable $dir_open is assigned to the perspective ...


What is the ternary operator?

Written by Nitin Venkatesh on Feb. 5, 2013, 6:41 a.m.

The ternary operator is used to write a very short version of an if-else block (in one line) and is used in a number of programming languages. The format of using a ternary operator is (condtion) ? truth statement : false statement Let’s see a simple example in PHP to check if the number stored in the variable is 1 or not, echo ($var == 1) ? 'Number stored is 1' : 'Number stored is not one' ; The same thing in a full if-else block would be as follows: if ($var == 1){ echo "Number stored is 1"; } else{ echo "Number stored is not one"; } We can also use nested ternary operators just as we would use ...