Posts Tagged ‘unity’

How to add repository manually from command line in Ubuntu Linux

Sunday, January 8th, 2012

I'm on a way trying to install Free Mega Games Pack and I'm facing troubles in following the instructions to add a the latest development wine version described on http://www.winehq.org/download/ubuntu
The guys from WineHQ has to update the wine install instructions, since the instructions are targetting older versions of Ubuntu which are not compatible with newer Ubuntus which comes natively with Unity
In order to complete the step in adding the WineHQ Ubuntu PPA development repository my only way was to add it using command line.
Here is how:

root@ubuntu:~# apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa
You are about to add the following PPA to your system:
Latest official WineHQ releases
Welcome to the Wine Team PPA. Here you can get the latest available Wine betas for every supported version of Ubuntu. This PPA is managed by Scott Ritchie, and is a replacement for the WineHQ budgetdedicated.com repository used for Jaunty and earlier.
More info: https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-wine/+archive/ppa
Press [ENTER] to continue or ctrl-c to cancel adding it
Executing: gpg --ignore-time-conflict --no-options --no-default-keyring --secret-keyring /tmp/tmp.bvo21sFWKG --trustdb-name /etc/apt/trustdb.gpg --keyring /etc/apt/trusted.gpg --primary-keyring /etc/apt/trusted.gpg --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80/ --recv 883E8688397576B6C509DF495A9A06AEF9CB8DB0
gpg: requesting key F9CB8DB0 from hkp server keyserver.ubuntu.com
gpg: key F9CB8DB0: public key "Launchpad PPA for Ubuntu Wine Team" imported
gpg: no ultimately trusted keys found
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg: imported: 1 (RSA: 1)

Similarly adding a PPA repository on Debian is also possible by using a little shell script add-apt-repository.sh . add-apt-repository.sh simulates what ubuntu's apt-add-repositry python script does.

It is educative to mention PPA stands for (Personal package Archive) and the difference between normal repository and PPA is mainly in the fact that PPA repositories makes a package distributed by the repository like the native Ubuntu packages issued by Canonical.
Once for example a new version of a file is placed in PPA deb package repository, the newer package will be automatically installed to the system using it.

How to make wicd systray to appear in GNOME on Ubuntu 11.10 / How to fix missing wicd network manager systray on Ubuntu

Monday, November 7th, 2011

After upgrading my sis’s notebook from Ubuntu 11.04 to Ubuntu 11.10 on her Acer Aspire 5736Z the default gnome wireless network manager started behaving oddly.
The Network Manager did not show any networks, even though the network drivers showed that are loaded properly on the Linux host and using the normal commands like iwlist or iwconfig I could list and see the networks and even connect to a network.

As my sister is not a console geek like me it was necessery of course to have an easy way to connect herself to the Internet with nice GUI application. I personally love WICD Network Manager and as the default gnome manager was misbehaving I immediately installed her wicd.
With wicd , the wireless networks were properly listed and there was no connection issues to the wireless networks, however the wicd system tray was missing and hence everytime she wanted to connect to a wireless network, she had to keep wicd-client running active in the Dock or run it manually every time on connect, when she had to change her physical location and connect to another wireless network.
This of course is quite unhandy and gives her a bad image of Linux and I definitely want to make her love free software and GNU / Linux. Thus I want to give her a GNU / Linux she will be easy to use.

To make her more satisfied with her Ubuntu I googled around to see what causes the wicd systray to be missing after some research online I found out, its probably due to either wicd bug or some kind of interface changes in unity newer versions of Ubuntu. Some people online suggested a fix via changing values in gconf-editor but this work around by changing the values in gconf-editor:

'desktop' -> 'unity' -> 'panel'

I tried this suggested fix which was reported to work on Ubuntu 11.04 but the gconf registry suggested pathway was missing at all so this solution did not worked.

I further read some other suggested solution using wicd-client by invoking it with two args like so:

stanimira@ubuntu:~$ wicd-client -n &
...stanimira@ubuntu:~$ wicd-client -a &

This proposed solution did not worked either, then I found in one of the Ubuntu bugs reports, a little shell script (add-wicd-to-whitelist.sh) that changes some values in gconf so I proceeded downloaded and give it a try:

stanimira@ubuntu:~$ wget https://www.pc-freak.net/files/add-wicd-to-whitelist.sh
...
stanimira@ubuntu:~$ sh add-wicd-to-whitelist.sh
...

For my surprise running the script doesn’t immediately changed nothing and wicd wireless connectivity indicator was still missing from the tray.
I thought it might need to reload gnome so I give it a restart and HOORAY! after the restart the WICD connected wireless strength show up, like you can see in the screenshot below 😉

Wicd indicator running in systray on GNOME in Ubuntu 11.10

Now hope this fix will, help out there experiencing the same issues to work around his wireless network connectivity issues 😉 Cheers.