If you’re like me and use your computer a lot it’s important that the clock be accurate.  My PC clock was 10 minutes slow excuse does not really cut it at school and work.

So what do you do?

Easy!

Right click on the clock and click “Adjust Date & Time” enter your password and you get the “Time and Date Settings”  window.  From there make sure the “Periodically synchronize click with Internet servers” box is marked and then if you want to use a specific server click “Select Servers” otherwise you can click OK.  The default server is is ntp.ubuntu.com and 127.127.1.0.  If you do not have ntp support installed it will ask to install it when you click the checkbox installed above.  Once it finishes installing you can close the time and date settings and reopen it.  It will now be checked and running.

Once that is all completed you can verify that ntpd (The process that handles Network Time Protocol) is running by opening a terminal window and doing

ps -ef | grep ntp

Now that you have this accurate clock it may be time to go around the house and get everything adjusted!

All Versions, Desktop | No Comments »

Here’s a more simple tip to an command line version I saw earlier today. Had to get home to verify the setting existed somewhere in the GUI.

Goto: System > Preferences > Font

When the window opens there are 4 options for font rendering. The one on the lower right for LCD’s is the font smoothing that most people will want. You’re free to experiment though.

All Versions, X.Org | No Comments »

The default Ubuntu shell is Bash and today I dug up a good list of those commands here.

Dapper, Edgy, Shell | No Comments »

If your camera supports an RAW image format you can do a lot more to make the image better than going with the camera’s save as jpeg options.  Once an image is saved to jpeg the camera throws away the information used to build the image.  RAW is basically the raw information taken from the CCD in the digital camera with little or no post processing.

In Ubuntu adding RAW support to gimp is easy.

Just do:  sudo apt-get install gimp-ufraw

Restart the gimp if you’re using it and then open a raw image and you get to adjust it before it’s placed into the Gimp.

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Sorry been out sick all last week.

Lots to come though if you’re interested in digital photography!

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If there’s a tip you’re looking for or a tip you’d like to see listed here for others then feel free to email us at tips @ ubuntutips.org

Also if you’re interested in writing tips let us know at the same email and we’ll see about adding new authors.

Thanks! Read the rest of this entry »

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Recently I built a dual core machine.  It rips mp3’s from cd’s like a hot knife through butter.  However when we copied and discovered the music in iTunes to sync over to our iPods (Wife has  a Mac) we found out that the id3 tags were broken.  What I found out tonight was that when you build the mp3 preference in Sound Juicer you have to add the following line.

audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lame name=enc bitrate=160 ! id3v2mux

Set what you need set and you’re good to go.

For those who want to use Sound Juicer to rip mp3’s but do not know where to start Ubuntu Help comes in handy.  Incidentally that’s where I found the line above.  You can see the full tutorial here.

Dapper, Multimedia | No Comments »

I’ve found a good howto on getting MythTv running on Ubuntu Edgy.  It appears to be very complete with some good examples and links to many other resources for MythTv on Ubuntu.

For those who do not know what MythTv is.  MythTv is like Tivo for Linux.  With a pair of video recording cards you can do a lot with just one PC running MythTv.  In fact it’s more like Tivo and Slingbox rolled up into one.

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Yeah for the normal person Video for the iPod is a distant dream.  I’ve found a tutorial that enabled me to use HandBrake on Linux for the first time.  I’m in the process of writing up a new tutorial since that one did not really work out of the box for me and I doubt for others.

Stay Tuned!

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If you want to test the latest beta of the Flash 9 Player then follow these steps. Note: There’s a newer beta out which can be found here. The directions below should still work.

1. Download the correct binary for linux at Adobe labs

http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer9.html

2. Unpack the files into a directory somewhere.
tar -zxvf downloadedfilename.tar.gz
3. Copy libflashplayer.so into the following directory

sudo cp libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/

4. Give the file correct permissions.

Code:

sudo chmod 644 /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so

5. Link the file to Firefox’s plugins directory.

Code:

cd /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so libflashplayer.so

6. Restart Firefox and enjoy! You can put about:plugins in the url bar and hit enter and look for Flash Player 9 to make sure it’s installed.
If you’re having issues you can leave a comment here or on my thread over at Ubuntuforums.

Internet | No Comments »