Terminator is Here! Make Your Judgement!

I recently installed 'Terminator' on my laptop which is running Ubuntu Gutsy. Terminator is a neat little shell client for Linux and many other platforms, which enables you to split the shell screen horizontally and vertically into multiple shell screens. This is a feature that I've always longed for.

As a software developer I usually have to work with multiple applications and multiple shell instances at the same time. For example, very often I fire off my IDE from one shell instance, run my Maven builds in another shell instance, interact with SVN from another shell instance and browse the local file system from another shell instance. Most traditional shell clients attempt to address this requirement by providing tabs. Tabs are great but keeping track of which application is running in which tab and switching between them accordingly can be a real pain. It becomes an unavoidable annoyance when you open up more than 3 tabs.

In my opinion, Terminator gives you the most optimal solution for this problem by giving the ability to split a single shell screen into multiple shell screens. You can see all the shell instances you have opened up on your screen at one glance and switching between them is lot more easier than having to switch between tabs. Splitting the shell screen is also easy with Terminator. Simply right click on the Terminator shell and select one of the split options available from the context menu that appears. Following is a little screen shot of Terminator that I took when working with four shell instances. It clearly illustrates the power of Terminator.

Installing Terminator on Ubuntu systems is also pretty easy. Simply add the following line to your sources.list file, update the apt cache and type 'sudo apt-get install terminator' to install the application. Piece of cake!!

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/gnome-terminator/ubuntu gutsy main restricted universe multiverse

(Depending on the version of your Ubuntu installation, you might have to edit this line)

If you often happen to work with many shell screens at once you'll definitely love 'Terminator'. So install 'Terminator' today and join the fun!!

Be Careful Using Ubuntu Update Manager

Ubuntu Linux comes with a pretty cool Update Manager tool which searches for software updates and patches on the Internet and provides options to install them. I've been using this tool for months to install various updates on my system. The best thing about the Ubuntu Update Manager is that, it not only updates the OS but also updates the drivers and other utilities installed on the system. Everything seemed to work fine until I installed some kernel updates on my system using the Update Manager.

After applying the updates the Update Manager required a system restart to complete the update process. This has happened before so I patiently complied. But when the system rebooted I noticed that my system has gone dumb. Sounds were not working at all. And then I tried to connect to the Internet via Wi-Fi, only to find that my wireless network device is also screwed up. Luckily for me I have some friends who are professional Linux experts. I hooked up my computer to a wired network and contacted them over the Internet.

Fixing the wireless connectivity issue was not a big deal. The very Update Manager which got me into trouble helped me out. I installed a bunch of driver updates listed by the Update Manager. Then after a system reboot my Wi-Fi device was back up and running.

The difficult part was fixing the audio related issue. I had to fire up the synaptic package manager and install a couple of Linux backport modules and restart the system to get sounds working again.

However all in all it was yet another learning experience for me. If you are a regular Ubuntu Linux user like me, my advice to you is be careful when installing kernel patches using the Update Manager. Know what you are doing. Be ready to deal with some undesirable results.

Having Issues with Ubuntu Visual Effects?

I have been experiencing issues activating Ubuntu visual effects on my laptop. I installed Ubuntu Gutsy on my laptop few months back (yes, I'm yet to upgrade to Ubuntu Hardy) and it works fine except that it never allowed me to turn the visual effects on. I have seen these visual effects in action on other computers and they are really exciting. I quite haven't seen anything similar even in the Windows world. So I badly wanted to use visual effects on my personal laptop but strangely it never allowed me. Whenever I tried to activate visual effects, Ubuntu gave me an error simply saying something like 'unable to turn visual effects on'. (wow! what a descriptive error message, isn't it?)

So after a bit of googling and reading some forum entries I managed to diagnose the problem. The issue was with my VGA card which is treated as 'blacklisted' by Linux. This particular type of VGA (Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller) is being used in a variety of laptops these days and hence I thought of blogging a bit about this and let the world know. If you don't know how to find the type of VGA in your computer simply enter the following command in a shell.

$ lspci | grep VGA

In order to find whether your VGA is blacklisted or not run the following command.

$ compiz --replace ccp &

If your VGA is blacklisted you will see something like this on the terminal.

[1] 6002
Checking for Xgl: not present
Blacklisted PCIID '8086:2a02' found
aborting and using fallback: /usr/bin/metacity

If this is the case you can do a simple override so that Linux won't care whether your VGA is blacklisted or not. Then you can turn the visual effects on and off at will. To perform the override run the following command. (this workaround has been tested on the above mentioned VGA only, so beware and attempt at your own risk!)

$ mkdir -p ~/.config/compiz; echo SKIP_CHECKS=yes >> ~/.config/compiz/compiz-manager

This will create a small configuration file named compiz-manager in the ~/.config/compiz directory. This file will instruct Linux to skip certain tests which cause the failures in turning the visual effects on.

And that's basically it. If you need more information please take a look at this forum post.