Linux, Commies, and Capitolism

Note: How To's are located at bottom of post

Ok, for those of you who don't know what Linux is, crank up google and do a search. Its ok, I'll wait.

Ok, so now you know that Linux is a free operating system with a number of distributions from companies like Red Hat, SuSe, and others. Recently, at the advise of my java programing guru, I decided to try the Ubuntu version of Linux.

At first I typed in the wrong URL and went to Ubuntu.org which is a left leaning world community web site. I have nothing against left leaning community sites but I thought it was an odd place to store a Linux distribution. But then again, some raging capitalist believe the Linux development effort is lead by leftist radicals out to destroy the capitalist system as a whole. After all the thing is free!

What those folks don't understand is that the open source movement is built on the economics of ego, not dollars. You can download the source to the Linux kernel, make changes to it, compile it, and walla! You have your own operating system. For those of us with a semblance of life and a brain somewhat smaller than Jupiter this is a daunting task that we would never, ever, in a gagillion years undertake.

But luckily for us there are folks with brains the size of Jupiter that can do that and do it as a labor of love, pride the the ability to look down their nose at the rest of us that have, at least once in our lives, kissed a member of the opposite sex. But I digress.

I'm a wood-be java developer who is being guided on his virginal steps into Javadom but an experiance hack who works on an open source project that displays graphics for some of the games I enjoy. If you're interested you can go to the RPTools project web site.

I needed to reformat my aging laptop and decided to install Linux on it. I use Linux often and its my operating system of choice for home because I have teenagers who regularly virus anything with a Microsoft logo. Linux solved my woes and kept me from reinstalling Windows every other month.

So I took my old Dell Inspiron 8100 and and installed Ubuntu Linux. I liked the install process because it tool only one CD vs. the 4 that are required for Red Hat's Fedora Core or Suse Linux. The install went smoothly and I was up and running in no time. I installed Eclipse for Java development and upgraded the Java 1.4 to Java 5. Later I upgraded to Java 6.

Here's a list of things I did to get Ubuntu running on the laptop.


To install Java 5:
Open a terminal window.
sudo apt-get install sun-java5-jdk

And that's all there was to it.

Here's a link that discusses installing Tomcat as well.
http://www.spaceprogram.com/knowledge/2006/05/installing-java-5-jdk-and-tomcat-on.html

The next problem I ran into was Netscape Firefox had an issue. When I used the touch pad Firefox would navigate back to previous pages. This problem with Firefix and Unbuntu Linux was solved at the following link.

http://www.beginningubuntu.com/dapper_tips.html

Here's a quote from that page.

To configure the horizontal scroll of the touchpad to actually horizontally scroll a webpage, open Firefox, type about:config in the address box, and use that page's "Filter" text box to search for mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action. Double-click the line in the results and set the value to 1, rather than 2. The change will be instant and permanent.

Later I decided to upgrade to Java 6 on Unbuntu Linux. Here are the steps I followed for that.

download java from http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp
cd to dowload directory
chmod a+x jdk-6-linux-i586.bin
sudo ./jdk-6-linux-i586.bin
sudo mv jdk1.6.0 /usr/lib/jvm/
sudo update-alternatives --install "/usr/bin/java" "java" "/usr/lib/jvm/jdk1.6.0/bin/java" 1
sudo update-alternatives --set java /usr/lib/jvm/jdk1.6.0/bin/java
java -version

For those of you who want to just install the Java runtime, go to my fellow blogger's page for those instructions.

http://rchandran.blogspot.com/2006/12/as-java-se-1.html

The only downside to the install is that my Dell 725 printer wouldn't work on Linux. I contacted Dell support and was told that printer wouldn't work with Linux. This runs contrary to what I know about print drivers but who knows what Microsoft has done to squash other peoples attempt break away from the Microsoft and enter a world with people are paid with praise and knowledge of a job well done.