SB Backup

SBackup is a simple backup solution for the Ubuntu desktop. It allows you to backup selected files and directories, define the file size limit, use regular expressions to exclude files and folders, and much more. These backups can then be saved locally, on removal media or even on remote directory. Let’s see how to install and configure SBackup for creating a backup and restore solution for an Ubuntu machine.

Install SBackup

Type the following command to install SBackup on your Ubuntu machine:

sudo apt-get install sbackup

Backing up using SBackup

Once installed SBackup will be available under System \ Administration \ Simple Backup Config.

SBackup window will look like the one below:

As you can see on the first tab “General”, there are 3 options for making backup. Depending on your need you can choose the one that you want to use. It can be used in 3 modes.

1. Use recommended backup settings

    Has all the default settings. All you have to do is click “Backup now” button to backup the default files and folders.

2. Use custom backup settings

    This one is for custom backups where the user can define what she/he wants to backup on a regular basis. This setting can be configured for automatic backups

3. Manual backups only

    This option should be used if you do not want to have regular automatic backups. You can backup manually whenever you think you need backups.

However, for the sake of this demo let’s use “Use custom backup settings”.

The next tab is “include” which let’s you define the folders and files you want to include while creating a backup. You can click add a file or folder by clicking the respective buttons.

The third tab is “exclude”. Here you can define, path, filetypes, regex and maximum size for exclusion criteria. For example you have added a directory included for backup, but you don’t want to backup files larger than 50 MB, you can use the exclude tab to define it.

The fourth tab is “Destination”. This one is used to define the destination location where you want to save the backup file.

As you can see there are 3 options for setting up destination backup location. The first one is the default location /var/backup/. The second option can be used to define the custom backup destination. The third option is used when you want the backup destination on a remote location.

The fifth tab is to set up schedule of backup. This one is pretty self explanatory.

The last tab “purging” is about how the old backup files will be handled. You can choose from one of the 2 options. In my case I am leaving it as the default selection which is Logarithmic (Recommended).

We are done with configuring all the settings. All that is left is to click the “Save” button for the backup settings to be effective. However, you can also click “Backup Now !” button to make an instant backup.

Restoring from a backup

In order to restore from an existing backup go to System \ Administration \ System Backup Restore.

Select from the available backups, the one that you want to restore.

If you are looking for a quality backup app for your Linux desktop, SBackup is a great choice.

Links

http://sourceforge.net/projects/sbackup/

Exaile is a solid choice for Ubuntu users to manage their music collections. It incorporates automatic fetching of album art, lyrics, artist/album information via Wikipedia, Last.fm scrobbling. It also supports Internet radio services like Shoutcast, includes tabbed playlists, and supports your iPod and other portable music players.

Install Exaile 0.3.0 on Ubuntu

Let’s take a look at how to install Exaile 0.3 on Ubuntu 9.04. The first step in the process is to get PPA added to your software sources list. Go to System \ Administration \ Software Sources.

Go the the tab that reads Third Party Software and add the following:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/exaile-devel/ubuntu jaunty main

Adding the OpenPGP security key

1. Go to the Exaile PPA page (At the end of the post)

2. Download the signing key 1024R/43CBFCC0 (At the end of the post) from the PPA page.

3. Copy the key information on to gedit and save the file as Exaile on your desktop.

4. Import the Exaile OpenPGP key (that you saved on your desktop) by going to the Authentication tab on software sources window.

Install Exaile

Drop down to terminal and type the following commands

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install exaile

This should download and install Exaile 0.3.0 on your machine which takes a couple minutes.

Running Exaile

You can run Exaile by going to:

Applications > Sounds & Videos > Exaile Music Player

If you are a Linux user and want a cool way to play and manage your music collection, you might want to give Exaile a try.

Download Exaile 0.3.0.1

Scribus is an Open Source program that brings award-winning professional page layout to Linux/UNIX, Mac OS X, OS/2 Warp 4/e ComStation and Windows desktops with a combination of “press-ready” output and new approaches to page layout. Underneath the modern and user friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, Spot Colors, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation.

Installation

Here we take a look at installing Scribus on our Ubuntu system.

First, bring up the Synaptic Package Manager by going to System \ Administration \ Synaptic Package Manager.

Search for the package called as scribus. Select the necessary packages that you want to install by Right-clicking them and hitting mark for installation. I selected the following packages.

• scribus – Scribus 1.3.3.x (stable branch)
• scribus-ng – Scribus 1.3.x (development branch) scribus-ng package can be installed paralelly to the scribus package
• scribus-template – developer and user-contributed additional templates
• scribus-doc – Scribus 1.3.3.x documentation
• icc-profiles – a collection of common ICC profiles to use with Scribus and other color profile-aware software
• lprof – hardware color profiler that can be used to create color profiles for your hardware to be used with Scribus
• qt3-qtconfig – Ubuntu users are strongly advised to install this package for finetuning the Scribus GUI with their Gnome desktop

Click the Apply Button to start installing the application.

Depending on the speed of your Internet connection the package will be downloaded and installed.

Using Scribus

You can start Scribus by going to Applications \ Graphics \ Scribus.

The following is how the application looks. The interface is pretty intuitive to use.

Let’s quickly create a quick letter head and save the file as PDF.

1. Open a new Scribus document.

2. Click on Insert \ Shape to insert a rectangle as shown below. By default the color of the rectangle shape is black.

3. In order to change the color of the shape, right click on it and click properties to bring up the properties window.

4. Click color to change the color of the box. Following is how it looks:

5. Now let’s get the image for our letter head. Make sure you have your image ready. Click on Insert \ Image Frame to insert an Image frame. (Note: This does not inserts image, it only inserts the frame). It should look something like this:

6. In order to insert the image in the image frame right click the image frame you just created and click Get Image.

7. Locate and select the image to insert it.

8. Now let’s create the title of the letter head. To do so click, Insert \ Text Frame. Right click on the frame and click Edit Text to bring up the text editing box. Enter the title of your letter head.

9. Let’s save this letter head in PDF format. Click File \ Export \ Save as PDF. The PDF file looks like this:

That’s it! The letter head is ready for use. If you are looking for a quality desktop publishing tool for Linux Scribus is definitely worth a look.

Scribus Homepage

Earlier you had to compile the program on your Linux machine to be able to use it. However, the developer(s) have come out with an easy solution by releasing deb files for the same.

Features of OpenShot

• Support for many video, audio, and image formats (based on FFmpeg)
• Gnome integration (drag and drop support)
• Multiple tracks
• Clip resizing, trimming, snapping, and cutting
• Video transitions with real-time previews
• Compositing, image overlays, watermarks
• Title templates, title creation
• Solid color clips (including alpha compositing)
• Support for Rotoscoping / Image sequences
• Drag and drop timeline
• Frame stepping, key-mappings: J,K, and L keys
• Video encoding (based on FFmpeg)

Download and Install OpenShot on Ubuntu

In order to run and start using OpenShot on Ubuntu we will have to download the respective deb file and install it. Download the respective deb file based on the version of your Ubuntu and CPU from the download page (link below). You’ll also have to download the dependency package from the same page (dependencies_32_904.tar.gz)

Install OpenShot On Ubuntu

Once you have downloaded the respective deb files (The main package and dependency files) start the installation by installing the dependencies first. Double click the dependency package (dependencies_32_904.tar.gz) and install all the 4 deb files:

1. openshot-ffmpeg_git-2623d8f-1_i386.deb
2. openshot-frei0r_1.1.22-1_i386.deb
3. openshot-mlt_0.4.3-1_i386.deb
4. openshot-x264_0.67.1173-1_i386.deb

Once you have installed all the dependency package we’ll install the main package (openshot.deb). Double click the package to install it.

Running OpenShot

Once installed you can run the OpenShot video editor by going to Applications \ Sound & Video  \ OpenShot Video Editor.

The main interface is nicely laid out and easy to use.

Importing the video in OpenShot

Importing videos for editing is very easy all you have to do is click File \ Import Files.

Exporting videos is very easy and you can export your video in multiple formats. Click the red button to export the edited video.

You can choose from several different effects and video settings.

List of Features

The following is an impressive full list of features for OpenShot:

• Support for many video, audio, and image formats (based on FFmpeg)
• Gnome integration (drag and drop support)
• Multiple tracks
• Clip resizing, trimming, snapping, and cutting
• Video transitions with real-time previews
• Compositing, image overlays, watermarks
• Title templates, title creation
• Solid color clips (including alpha compositing)
• Support for Rotoscoping / Image sequences
• Drag and drop timeline
• Frame stepping, key-mappings: J,K, and L keys
• Video encoding (based on FFmpeg)

OpenShot is a stable and easy to use video editor for Ubuntu and is also available in Spanish, French, and Italian.

Download OpenShot for Ubuntu Linux

Note:  For this article we are using version 3.0.2 on a Windows 7 (32-bit) guest OS.

Install Guest Additions for Windows

Guest Additions installs on the guest system and includes device drivers and system applications that optimize performance of the machine.  Launch the guest OS in VirtualBox and click on Devices and Install Guest Additions.

The AutoPlay window opens on the guest OS and click on the Run VBox Windows Additions executable.

Click yes when the UAC screen comes up.

Now simply follow through the installation wizard.

During the installation wizard you can choose the Direct3D acceleration if you would like it.  Remember this is going to take up more of your Host OS’s resources and is still experimental possibly making the guest unstable.

When the installation starts you will need to allow the Sun display adapters to be installed.

After everything has completed a reboot is required.

Install Guest Additions for Ubuntu

Note:  For this section we are using version 3.0.2 on Ubuntu 8.10 (32-bit) version.

If you have Ubuntu running in a virtual machine installing the Guest Additions is easy as well.  With the Ubuntu virtual machine running click on Devices and Install Guest Additions.

This will mount the ISO and show an icon on the desktop and give you the following message box where you just click Run.

Enter in your admin password and click OK.

Next you will see the installation taking place and when done you’ll prompted to click on Enter.

A Reboot of the guest OS is required to complete the installation.

Command Line Installation

If the above process doesn’t work or you want to use the command line to install Guest Additions then first open up a Terminal session.

Now type in the following commands.

cd /media/cdrom

ls

sudo ./VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run

Again a restart of Ubuntu is required from the GUI or type in “sudo reboot” (without quotes) in the command line.

There are a lot of cool features included with the Guest Additions such as clipboard and folder sharing, better video support, and mouse pointer integration which lets you navigate in the guest OS without having it capture the pointer. 

Related VirtualBox articles:

Try Out a New Operating System the Easy Way with VirtualBox

Use VirtualBox to Test Linux on Your Windows PC

Before you install Tomcat you’ll want to make sure that you’ve installed Java. I would assume if you are trying to install Tomcat you’ve already installed java, but if you aren’t sure you can check with the dpkg command like so:

dpkg –get-selections | grep sun-java

This should give you this output if you already installed java:

sun-java6-bin                                   install
sun-java6-jdk                                   install
sun-java6-jre                                   install

If that command has no results, you’ll want to install the latest version with this command:

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk

Installation

Now we’ll download and extract Tomcat from the apache site. You should check to make sure there’s not another version and adjust accordingly.

wget http://apache.hoxt.com/tomcat/tomcat-6/v6.0.14/bin/apache-tomcat-6.0.14.tar.gz

tar xvzf apache-tomcat-6.0.14.tar.gz

The best thing to do is move the tomcat folder to a permanent location. I chose /usr/local/tomcat, but you could move it somewhere else if you wanted to.

sudo mv apache-tomcat-6.0.14 /usr/local/tomcat

Tomcat requires setting the JAVA_HOME variable. The best way to do this is to set it in your .bashrc file. You could also edit your startup.sh file if you so chose.

The better method is editing your .bashrc file and adding the bolded line there. You’ll have to logout of the shell for the change to take effect.

vi ~/.bashrc

Add the following line:

export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun

At this point you can start tomcat by just executing the startup.sh script in the tomcat/bin folder.

Automatic Starting

To make tomcat automatically start when we boot up the computer, you can add a script to make it auto-start and shutdown.

sudo vi /etc/init.d/tomcat

Now paste in the following:

# Tomcat auto-start
#
# description: Auto-starts tomcat
# processname: tomcat
# pidfile: /var/run/tomcat.pid

export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun

case $1 in
start)
        sh /usr/local/tomcat/bin/startup.sh
        ;;
stop)  
        sh /usr/local/tomcat/bin/shutdown.sh
        ;;
restart)
        sh /usr/local/tomcat/bin/shutdown.sh
        sh /usr/local/tomcat/bin/startup.sh
        ;;
esac   
exit 0

You’ll need to make the script executable by running the chmod command:

sudo chmod 755 /etc/init.d/tomcat

The last step is actually linking this script to the startup folders with a symbolic link. Execute these two commands and we should be on our way.

sudo ln -s /etc/init.d/tomcat /etc/rc1.d/K99tomcat
sudo ln -s /etc/init.d/tomcat /etc/rc2.d/S99tomcat

Tomcat should now be fully installed and operational. Enjoy!

The only reason to do this instead of removing the packages would be because you might want to still sometimes use the box through the GUI.

Disable X.Org

In order to disable the graphical environment, we’ll need to disable GDM, the Gnome Display Manager. In order to do this, you’ll need to run the following command at the terminal:

sudo update-rc.d -f gdm remove

When you restart your computer, you’ll be presented with a text-mode login prompt instead of the graphical environment.

Run X.Org While Disabled

If you want to run the graphical environment, all you have to do is type the following command from the prompt, making sure to run it as your normal user account.

startx

The annoying gray screen will go away once Gnome is fully started.

Enable X.Org

If you want to re-enable X11 it’s a simple matter of running this command from the terminal:

sudo update-rc.d -f gdm defaults

When you restart, you’ll be presented with the graphical prompt again.

I just installed this box recently, and then did an upgrade…. already there are 7 items in the menu.

To remove these entries, we’ll need to edit the file /boot/grub/menu.lst. You can do this by using Alt+F2 and then typing in the following command:

gksu gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

Now that we’ve got the file open, scroll down to the bottom of the file where it says “End Default Options”, and you’ll find all the menu entries for the various kernels in here. You can just select and delete the ones you don’t want.

Save the file, and then the next time you boot up you’ll see a much nicer set of options.

I’m guessing it would also be prudent to clean up the other unused kernel files that are sitting out there… I’m sure there’s some automated tool to do that, but I’ve not taken the time to figure it out yet.

Here’s the message that I get every time:

Linux superfast 2.6.20-16-generic #2 SMP Thu Jun 7 19:00:28 UTC 2007 x86_64

The programs included with the Ubuntu system are free software;
the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the
individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright.

Ubuntu comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by
applicable law.

Last login: Mon Aug 13 01:05:46 2007 from ipaddress removed

geek@superfast:~$

Changing this message requires editing two different files. The first three sections can be modified by editing the following file:

/etc/motd

This file contains the linux build number as well as the Ubuntu warranty message. I don’t find this particularly useful, so I removed all of it and replaced it with my own message.

To disable the last login message (which I don’t recommend doing), you will need to edit the following file in sudo mode:

/etc/ssh/sshd_config

Find this line in the file and change the yes to no as shown:

PrintLastLog no

Now when you login, you’ll get a blank prompt, although I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it because it’s useful to see the last login to the system for security reasons. This is my prompt now:

This is a superfast system. Please max out the cpu accordingly.

Last login: Mon Aug 13 01:24:14 2007 from ipaddress removed
geek@superfast:~$

Linux is really great.

All you need to do is open up the /boot/grub/menu.lst file in your favorite text editor (in sudo mode)

sudo vi /boot/grub/menu.lst

Find the section of the file that contains the timeout information

## timeout sec
# Set a timeout, in SEC seconds, before automatically booting the default entry
# (normally the first entry defined)
# timeout      3

Just put a # before the “timeout 3″ line in the file, then save and restart your computer.

Now grub will wait forever until you make a choice. This is especially useful if you want to prevent your computer from ever booting into Windows…