This year marks the start of the new Daylight Savings Time standards set in place by congress. Everyone seems to be scrambling around to get every PC, router, switch, phone, and any other piece of hardware that keeps time updated.

Below are the instructions on how to accomplish this on Ubuntu.

Open up a terminal window or go to tty1 and enter the following command:


Youll see 4 lines being returned, if they match the lines below than youre ok:


If your lines dont match then youll need to following the following steps:
1. Open up terminal or switch to tty1(youll need to login)
2. cd /tmp
3. ftp elsie.nci.nih.gov
user: anonymous
pass: you_(at)_you.com --Substitute the _(at)_ for @
4. cd pub
5. ls
6. use 'get' to get the latest tzdata file like so:
get tzdata2007a.tar.gz
7. quit
8. mkdir tzdata
9. mv tzdata*.gz tzdata/.
10. cd tzdata
11. tar xzvf *.gz
12. sudo cp /etc/localtime /etc/localtime.LAST
13. sudo rm /etc/localtime
14. sudo zic northamerica
15. sudo ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/EST5EDT /etc/localtime
16. sudo zdump -v /etc/localtime | grep 2007

You should now show the correct lines from above.

Info from: Ubuntu Forums

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I daily scroll the hundreds of posts on Digg, and as usual print or write down anything useful, especially when it relates to Ubuntu or linux in general. Digg managed to take down an Arsgeek page dubbed "How to gracefully reboot your Ubuntu/Debian system if all else fails", luckily duggmirror.com caught and archived it before it went down.

Heres an excerpt from the page:


Thanks Arsgeek for this great heads-up, i hope it helps everyone as much as it did me.

Link: http://www.arsgeek.com/?p=787

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As an avid linux user, I'm always customizing my desktop to the way i want it. I decided to play around this weekend and try my hand at making a GDM theme, I've dubbed it BlueTechno and its based off of the NovumOS GDM theme and a background called Calligrafik, you can find both of these on http://www.gnome-look.org

Look below for the screenshot and download link.

I hope all of you enjoy this theme.



Download from Gnome-Look.org

P.S. To take a GDM screenshot in Ubuntu, open Alacarte menu editor and go to System tools, place a check in the box for "New login in a nested window". Note: you may need to install xnest for this to work.

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This guide is to emulate the OLPC XO operating system on Ubuntu Dapper Drake, it should convert to Edgy and beyond easily, although you may run into a few problems.

Programs Needed:

Qemu v0.8.1 or greater
GCC 3 or greater

Installing The Programs:

The easiest way to get the newest version of Qemu is to download the binary distribution from http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/download.html

Save the file into the root director and open a terminal and issue the following commands:


This will extract the files into their neccessary directories and thats it!

Downloading the OLPC XO Image:
Open a web browser and navigate to http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OS_images, under the section entitled " Latest Stable Build" there will be a link to the latest stable version. Follow the link and navigate into the ext3 folder. Iniside there will be severl files, the one we want to download is the one ending in img.bz2. Once you download the file, extract the image to anywhere you want, and then go back to your terminal.

In our example we extracted our image to the desktop, so we need to issue the following commands:


Depending on which version of the image you get, you will need to change the image name. After you issue the command, a black window will pop-up and the boot process will begin.

Using the Desktop:
Excerpt and photos from: http://www.osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=16487&comment_id=182482
Here is a screenshot from QEMU image interface:

Top left screen:
- Virtual mode mode, group mode, individual mode and recent ccess

Top right:
- Shutdown button, wireless status and window switcher

Bottom left:
- Etoys: educational programming language that is part of the Squeak Smalltalk language.
- Chat: a simple chat interface
- Browser: gecko based using xulrunner

- Memory games
- Penguin TV: to view multimedia
- Abiword:

- Tam-Tam: a music synthesis tool


Notes and Thoughts:
The build used in this tutorial is Build 182, later builds may appear different. From what I've seen so far, i believe a regular linux desktop would be more effective than what is shown here. By looking at the mockups on the OLPC wiki page, theres great things in the future. However from the current setup, they have a long way to go.

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Hey guys got a little bored and made this Ubuntu signature, feel free to use it if you want.



The tutorials to make it is found here:
http://www.bartelme.at/journal/archive/creating_badges/
http://pxlgfx.com/tutorials/Polished_Text/

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As with most Linux distros or Open-Source programs, there are several easter eggs in them, the hard part is finding them. We've done the work of searching the net for those that we could find, and here they are. These easter eggs are not just for Ubuntu but will work on most distributions, however some may involve downloading additional programs like apt-get.

1. The Book of Mozilla
Open a Firefox, Mozilla, or Netscape tab or window, and type: “about:mozilla” in the URL field. You will get a message from the book of Mozilla, depending on your version, you will get 1 of 3 passages from here: http://www.mozilla.org/book/

It is said that if it's done in Internet Explorer that it will give a blue screen similar to the wonderful BSOD.

2. Hidden Release Names
These funny “Ubuntu names” are stored in your Ubuntu kernel documentation files:

jonathan@highvoltage-t42 $ zcat /usr/share/doc/linux-image-`uname -r`/changelog.Debian.gz | egrep -e "Release"
The "Ben got a PowerBook for Christmas" Release.
The "Quickest re-release ever" Release
The "Oh crap, what did I get myself into?" Release.
The "Welcome Ben!" Release.
The "Morose Mungbean" Release.
The "Laughing Lentil" Release.
...

There’s also:

jonathan@highvoltage-t42 $ zgrep "The.*Release" /usr/share/doc/dpkg/changelog.Debian.gz
The "Good, clean fun" Release.
The "Bully's Special Prize" Release.
The "On like Donkey Kong" Release.
The "In like Flynn" Release.
The "Maidenhead Creeping Water Plant" Release.
The "Just kidding about the God part" Release.
The "Flatulent Elm of West Ruislip" Release.
The "? ????????????" Release.
...

3. OpenOffice.org Star Wars + More
Star Wars is only one of the games that are added in OO.o, with a simple search around the net you'd be suprised by how many extras there are. This will work across distributions and even on window$ and on NeoOffice on Macintosh.

Open up OpenOffice.org2 Calc, then enter:
=Game(”StarWars”)
in any cell and press enter!

Also, try the Tic-Tac-Toe Easter Egg in OpenOffice:
in a cell outside of the range A1:C3 type:

=Game(A1:C3;"TicTacToe")
(Hint: make a larger merged cell outside of that range, and select to wrap the text in it, to see the instructions)

Check out http://wiki.(...)ter_Eggs for more.

4. Apt-Get Fun
Apt-get and aptitude both have some nice little easter eggs, you have to work a little harder to get aptitude to cooperate. Note: The text in italics is what you type in at the termianl and the text after it is the response you get.

Open a terminal and run the following:

apt-get moo

(__)
(oo)
/——\/
/ | ||
* /\—/\
~~ ~~
….”Have you mooed today?”…


aptitude help
This aptitude does not have Super Cow Powers.

aptitude moo
There are no Easter Eggs in this program.

aptitude -v moo
There really are no Easter Eggs in this program.

aptitude -vv moo
Didn’t I already tell you that there are no Easter Eggs in this program?

aptitude -vvv moo
Stop it!

aptitude -vvvv moo
Okay, okay, if I give you an Easter Egg, will you go away?

aptitude -vvvvv moo
All right, you win.

/—-\
——-/ \
/ \
/ |
—————–/ ——–\
———————————————-

aptitude -vvvvvv moo
What is it? It's an elephant being eaten by a snake, of course.

This is a reference to Antoine de St. Exupery's "The Little Prince"

5. Gnome Fun
Under Gnome, press Alt+F2 (to execute a command), and then, type: "free the fish" (without the quotation marks of course).
You can also open the About Panels dialog box and press the "f" key three times.
The fish(Wanda) will then appear on the screen and will keep moving around. If you click on wanda she will swim offscreen and come back a short time later. To get rid of her you can press Alt + F2 and type "pkill gnome-panel" without the quotes. Your bars will disappear and then come back later.

Again, press Alt+F2 and type "gegls from outer space" (without the quotation marks of course). The result is a space invaders game but with cows


I hope you enjoy these easter eggs, if you have any more, feel free to post them in the comments section and I'll add them in!

Sources:
http://jonathancarter.co.za/?p=25
http://swobo(...)ives/364
http://www.eeggs.com/items/43172.html
http://julip(...)ggs.html

Thanks To:
John
EvanCarroll
alucardX
Galaad2

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