Guess whats available on Shipit?….

Yup! Hardy CD’s!

Upgraded to Hardy!

Decided this time i couldn’t wait for the full release, so I’ve installed the beta…its running great…

Making the terminal more friendly

Ah the terminal, the terrifying black box that scares many new users off. “But don’t you have to program it and use it all the time?” is regularly heard from uninformed Windows and Mac users. Once you give it a go though, the terminal is your friend, the stigma lifts and you realise its your flexible customisable friend! One thing that I find really annoying though, is the way that you have all these commands and keywords to remember, I especially have using chmod and all its options, as well as tar. They’ve got loads of different arguments when in reality, you only use one particular combination all the time.

Heres where your .bashrc file comes in, with this file, you can make it easier to execute the commands you enter most often, imagine instead of having to type “sudo mount -t vfat /media/sbd1″, which I have to do everytime i want to mount my external hard drive (If you know of a fix, please tell me!), all you have to type is “mhd”!

This is really simple to do, all you have to do is add this line to your .bashrc file - alias mhd=”sudo mount -t vfat /media/sbd1″ Now every time you type mhd, it executes the command shown. Here’s a step by step

1. Open a terminal

2. Open the .bashrc file, “sudo gedit /.bashrc”

3. Add the required lines

4. Save the file

5. Run the following command, “source /.bashrc “

6. You’re good to go!

Ubuntu Brainstorm

Well heres a blantent and complete rip off! Ubuntu have created their own version of the Dell Ideastorm website, called Brainstorm, to find out what the community want from Ubuntu, log on and voice your opinion!

Link

via (The Xubuntu Blog)

To MOTU or not to MOTU, that is the question.

If you’ve been following Ubuntu planet recently, you can’t miss the accounts of people documenting their journey to becoming a MOTU (if this acronym is foreign to you click here). It sounds like an interesting thing to do, as you learn loads and are also contributing to the community by packaging applications to make it easier for users to install them.

The main motivation behind this is to contribute to the community, which, bar a little Irish translation on Rosetta, and I suppose, this blog! I haven’t really done at all, plus it gives the opportunity to learn a load more about the operating system.

So at the moment, I’m reading the pre-requisite documentation to get a feel for the process, there’s a lot to go through, and I don’t know if I have the experience for the job, but I think I’ll give it a go! Hopefully the fact that I’ll be soon training as a system admin for my university compsoc may help.

What I want from you is your thoughts on the whole system,  if you are a MOTU, training to be one or anything like that, let me know how its going/ it went and if it was worth the hassle!