Creative Internet By Design Blog

I’m posting this as a quick and easy “aide-mémoire” for myself as I have a feeling I may need to add the dropbox indicator to another machine I blitz and update to Natty.

Before doing anything else you MUST stop and remove your existing dropbox service. From the terminal type the following:

Then type the following:

Now we’re ready to install the latest version!

Step 1. Visit the Dropbox Forums and grab yourself the latest version (either stable or experimental) of the dropbox build for your operating system.

Nothing more simple than a wget from a terminal (e.g. wget http://dl-web.dropbox.com/u/17/dropbox-lnx.x86-1.2.4.tar.gz)

Step 2. No issues there? The file downloaded okay? Good. Within the terminal again we’ll want to untar the download:

Step 3. change to the extracted dropbox directory: cd .dropbox-dist/

Step 4. Install the latest daemon:

Once that kicks in you’ll most likely be guided through the reinstall of dropbox (this might also prompt for Nautilus to be restarted which is normal) – once the install has finished you will see the dropbox icon at the top synchronising your content and all is good!

I was having trouble the other day installing Adobe Acrobat Reader on my Ubuntu Lucid Lynx machine. At the time, I was downloading a particular PDF form from a website which contained fill-in-form fields. Despite installing Adobe Acrobat 9 from the repositories I found this version came up short when displaying PDF fill-in-forms.  The result I got was an uglier than ugly message:

Please wait…
If this message is not eventually replaced by the proper contents of the document, your PDF
viewer may not be able to display this type of document.
You can upgrade to the latest version of Adobe Reader for Windows®, Mac, or Linux® by
visiting http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html.
For more assistance with Adobe Reader visit http://www.adobe.com/support/products/
acrreader.html.

And the rest.

When you get to Adobe’s website on the above link, you get treated to a page requesting you to download a bin file.

However, not being that clued up with the ‘bin’ file format I attempted to execute the file that was downloaded using:

The error I received was:

The SOLUTION to the problem is very simple (as most are) and it is to make the bin file executable before attempting to run it.  Here’s how to do this:

From the terminal and in the same directory as you have downloaded your bin file in, type the following:

(Looks like nothing happened right, well, it did! Your file is now executable!) Now attempt to run it:

You should receive the message below:

This installation requires 145 MB of free disk space.

The installer will prompt you to ‘Enter installation directory for Adobe Reader 9.3.2 [/opt]‘ – type in ‘/opt’ (without the quotes).  Once done, the install will create a Adobe Desktop icon – simply double click on the icon to open Adobe Acrobat Reader and breathe easy again knowing you won’t have to race over to Windows just yet.

It was with little to no fanfare that the “personal cloud” service Ubuntu One was released on May 9th 2009 as an invitation only based beta product by Canonical. The product was released for the Ubuntu 9.04 platform with users requiring an update on their earlier Ubuntu distros to use the new service.

Ubuntu One at the time offered two storage plans: a free 2GB account and a $10/month 10 GB paid service. To make it clear, as if the name didn’t serve as enough of an indicator, this was (and is) an Ubuntu service for the Ubuntu platform only. Established Services such as DropBox and the Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) operate in a similar manner; the distinction being the former operates as a multi-platform storage tool and the latter is less geared towards the consumer market.

Since the release of Ubuntu 10.0.4 LTS (codename Lucid Lynx), Canonical have upped the Ubuntu One products feature set:

* Sync up to 2 GB of files, contacts, notes, bookmarks, purchased music, and Gwibber broadcast messages

* Automatically sync your digital life to your personal cloud and with all of your computers

* Mobile Contacts Sync

* Mark any directory in your home folder for sync

* Share folders with trusted contacts or publish files to the Internet with convenient short URLs

* Sync purchased songs from the Ubuntu One Music Store

* Integrated with your Ubuntu computer

* Convenient web browser access to your personal cloud

* 50 GB total of storage to sync more of your digital life (paid service only)

The Ubuntu One service utilises the Ubuntu Single Sign On (SSO) mechanism to ease the process of logging in to various Ubuntu sites. If you already have an account for example say, Launchpad, you can use your same credentials here.

Feel free to visit the Ubuntu single sign-on service

Ubuntu One is a built in option on the toolbar of Ubuntu 10.0.4 and can be quickly set up for file and folder synchronisation out of the box:

The Verdict

Having used Ubuntu One for some time now, for personal file synchronisation across different machines and group file/folder synchronisation with other colleagues, I feel it is a service which is brimming with promise but has a little way to be before it becomes falls in line with some of the other polished product offerings from Canonical.

Pros

1. Easy out of the box setup
2. Good integration with the Ubuntu interface (e.g. nautilus)
3. Uses single sign on mechanism with other Ubuntu sites
4. 10GB free account more than adequate for most needs

Cons

1. Synchronisation sometimes gets confused if files/folder are deleted from repository (i.e. conflicts occur)
2. Lack of progress meter on synchronisation leaves user unsure how far through synching they are

It looks like the ‘pros’ have it!

The inner workings of the Ubuntu One service are beyond the scope of this article, but for further information, consult the Ubuntu One: Support page

(The views expressed in this article are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Creative Internet By Design Ltd)