webbookblog

After a little pause for breath, here is part 4 of the Compiz series, focussing on the compiz config manager. You should by now have a working webbook with a few slightly fancy effects, switching between desktops will now slide the screen across and the menus fade in and out. You can also change the screen resolution to 1024×768 and have it compress onto the webbook native 1024×600 screen.

There are loads and loads of different settings you can mess with if you install the compiz configuration manager. Start the Synaptic package manager (System-Administration-Synaptic Package Manager) and install compizconfig-settings-manager. Once installed this will be in System-Preferences-CompizConfig Settings Manager.

I will tell you which settings I like, but don’t be afraid to play with others and leave a comment about ones you like/dislike.

• Right down the bottom of the list is the Move Window setting (you can only see this running at 1024×768, you can just about click on it at1024×600). In this section untick the “Constrain Y” checkbox. This allows you to alt-drag windows off the top of the screen which is rather important when running at 1024×600.
• In General Options (at the top) click the Desktop Size tab and change the Horizontal Vertical Size to 4. This is the number of sides of the cube (you can have 3 to make it a triangle or whatever shape you like really)
• Enable Rotate Cube, this will enable Desktop Cube and turn off Desktop Wall (the sliding between desktops thing) Go into the Rotate Cube options and change the zoom slider to about 0.5, this zooms out a bit when the cube is rotating.
• Enable Shift Switcher
• There are fun things to play with in Animations and you can turn on or off wobbly windows to suit your taste.

Magic keystrokes:

• Hold Ctrl+Alt then Click and drag to rotate the cube.
• Ctrl+Alt+ left, right or down cursor moves the cube about from the keyboard
• Windows+e to zoom out and see your desktops on a wall (you can drag applications about when zoomed out)
• Windows+Tab to flick through windows in the shift-switcher

Last Saturday was Software Freedom Day, a day to celebrate Free software and educate people about it. I arranged a loan of a couple of webbooks to each of the UK teams who were in their own ways telling people about the benefits of Software Freedom.
Here are a couple of pictures from the Cambridge event run by Robert Schumann

There are lots and lots of books available on Ubuntu, from beginners to experts there is something to suit everyone. I wanted to put up a book review on the blog and make some recommendations, but then I realised my own bookshelf is rather empty of books from the “beginner” end of the spectrum I am not really the right person to tell you how useful some of these books are to someone new to the webbook, but YOU are!
So here is my offer to you:

1. Buy a book on Ubuntu that you like the sound of
2. Write a short review letting people know how useful you found it as you get to know your webbook
3. Register as an Amazon Affiliate
4. Send me the review and your affiliate ID
5. I post the review and a link to the book with your Amazon ID in the link
6. People buy the book
7. Profit!!!

Here is a list of books from Amazon on Ubuntu:

These ones in particular sound like they ought to be good for beginners so that might be a nice place to start:

Leave a comment letting me know what you are reviewing, if two or more people want to get and review the same book that is fine, I will post all reviews.
Don’t make your retirement plans yet though, I have had an affiliate account for several years and my current balance is £9.21. Just another 79p and they will send me a cheque!

I have seen some reports (and seen it myself) of badly presented webbooks in store. One store I went to the display unit was missing, another it was switched off. Other people have seen even worse which I responded to later in the thread. Up to now I had assumed that the display models did not require special treatment and should just be exactly what you get if you buy one. Seems I may have to rethink that assumption. So what do you think would be the best way to present the webbook in store? I don’t really like the idea of a locked down rolling presentation. I want people to pick it up and play with it. What do you think?

If you are into music, and like to explore stuff you perhaps have not heard before then there is a little gem hidden in the webbook. Go to Applications-Sound & Video-Rhythmbox Music Player. This is a music manager, somewhat similar in concept to Apple iTunes. It can rip CDs, manage music on MP3 players and contains not one but two music stores. I will followup later with more detail on ripping CDs and messing about with MP3 (you need to install a few extra odds and sods from Synaptic to get the most from it) but today lets concentrate on the music stores. The first is Magnatune, click on this and it will download the catalog, you can then browse and play lots and lots of music. 8068 tracks that would take 22 days, 4 hours and 40 minutes to play back to back. You can buy the music too for a reasonable cost. None of it has any evil DRM, these are all MP3 files (the first time you use it you might have to let it install some plugins to let it decode the MP3 files) you can move about and put on different devices. I quite liked Lizzi and Myles Cochran, but your tastes may vary.
Next up is Jamendo, now this is a very big music store, 62428 tracks which would last 180 days, 7 hours and 49 minutes to play back to back. Now to be fair there is an awful lot of awful music in there, but if you are prepared to sit and listen for six months solid I am sure you will find something that appeals to you!

Just like Windows, Linux ships without support for the Adobe Flash player. Flash may be free as in no cost, but it is not Free as in Free Software so should not be redistributed. (A few early webbooks may have escaped the factory with Flash installed though.) The good news is that installing Flash on Ubuntu Linux is a lot easier than installing it on Windows. In fact installing pretty much anything you could ever want is easier on Ubuntu than Windows.
Start by going to System-Administration-Synaptic Package Manager. Because you are installing or removing applications that could impact other users of the webbook you will need to put in your password to get superuser priviledges (so you have to be the primary user or a user given administrator rights by the primary user).

There are a few ways of finding what you want, you can simply scroll down the list of packages or start typing the first few characters of the package you want and it will jump down to the right place, or hit the search button and it will find what you want even if you don’t know the package name.

For Flash you want the flashplugin-nonfree package. Feel free to mark anything else that looks interesting, then hit the Apply button to have the system automatically download and set everything up for you. Restart Firefox and you can see YouTube, BBC iPlayer, games and stories on the Cbeebies website and a whole lot more irritating adverts than before.

If Flash adverts annoy you then you could give the flashblock package a try, it is just above the flashplugin-nonfree package.

I started this story on our other blog but I think I will continue it here. In the last installment I was just waiting for the coop to arrive and beginning to design a run.

Last weekend when we got back from Ireland we had some arrivals, Miss White:

Goldie:

and Henrietta:

Miss White and Goldie are already laying one Free egg per day, Henrietta should start soon. So how much do Free eggs cost? Well quite a bit really. £20 per bird, £100 for the coop, about £100 for the materials for the run that I made. £10 for the feed dispenser, £10 for the water thing, about £20 for some food and corn and grit and worm stuff. I spent an evening assembling the coop and a couple of weeks of evenings building the run (if you ever need to attach chicken wire to a wooden frame don’t use a manual staple gun, get an electric one like I didn’t). I now spend a bit of time every morning letting them out and filling up the food and a bit more time every evening putting them away and shoveling an astonishing amount of chicken poo into the compost. It would be a lot less money and effort to just buy eggs from the supermarket. But I don’t want to do that, because these eggs are Free, and that is cool! To bring the topic back to the webbook, the software on the webbook is Free. Free as in Freedom, Free as in Free Range, Free as in Free eggs. Sometimes it can require a bit more effort than the supermarket variety, but it is much much better because you can see everything that went into it.