Install XBMC Media Center on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx 09/05/2010

XBMC is an award-winning free and open source (GPL) software media player and entertainment hub for digital media. XBMC is available for Linux, OSX, Windows, and the original Xbox.

While XBMC functions very well as a standard media player application for your computer, it has been designed to be the perfect companion for you. Supporting an almost endless range of remote controls, and combined with its beautiful interface and powerful skinning engine, XBMC feels very natural to use from the couch and is the ideal solution for your home theater.

Currently XBMC can be used to play almost all popular audio and video formats around. It was designed for network playback, so you can stream your multimedia from anywhere in the house or directly from the internet using practically any protocol available. Use your media as-is: XBMC can play CDs and DVDs directly from the disk or image file, almost all popular archive formats from your hard drive, and even files inside ZIP and RAR archives. It will even scan all of your media and automatically create a personalized library complete with box covers, descriptions, and fanart. There are playlist and slideshow functions, a weather forecast feature and many audio visualizations. Once installed
Installation of XBMC in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx

To install XBMC in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx, open terminal and  copy the commands bellow :

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install xbmc

Ubuntu: Backup all your Applications 08/30/2010

Lets say you have set up your *buntu box. Now you want to backup all the installed deb files so that you can restore them quickly and efficiently.

For one thing it would be easier to install everything as you would not have to go online and hunt for them. Further it would be useful where a computer does not have internet connection. In ubuntu “hunting” for programs is a rare occurrence thanks to the fantastic package managing system. However, you may personally have some programs that you have either compiled from source (using checkinstall, so that that a deb package is created and they are added to APT), or downloaded debs from obscure locations. Now each of these debs you will save in a directory so that in the future you do not have to go hunting for them. However, this command I have outlined backs up ALL packages, including the ones in the package manager. So, why would you want that?

Firstly, this is VERY useful if lets say you have setup a very basic installation with all updates, and all non-free video/audio/etc codecs. Further you have installed some basic useful software. Now lets say you want to install the SAME setup on your grandmothers computer, except she does not have internet connection, or at the time you go to set it up she does not have a net connection. Using this script you can have all your debs in one simple location, so you will not have to redownload everything.

Secondly, lets assume you work for a school, or a company, and you need to install the SAME ubuntu installation on 30 computers. Wouldn’t it be easier to simply put all these debs in a central server and issue the dpkg -i *.deb command. This way you don’t have to individually select the packages AND the packages don’t have to download.

Thirdly, (and this is purely personal) I like to be able to have all my installed packages at hand. This command doesn’t take much effort, and for me it only requires 1.4 gb of space, so for a bit of piece of mind I can easily have all my packages on hand.

There is no real reason to do this if you are already doing a full system backup (e.g. an image of your Ubuntu partition using partimage). This is just something I discovered and feel could be beneficial to other users.

These commands will do that for you.

Open a terminal and paste the following into it:

$ sudo apt-get install dpkg-repack fakeroot
$ mkdir ~/dpkg-repack; cd ~/dpkg-repack
$ fakeroot -u dpkg-repack `dpkg --get-selections | grep install | cut -f1`

(the last command will take some time)

Now if you scroll to your home folder, you should find a folder called “dpkg-repack” which should have all the deb files of all your installed packages.

RE-INSTALL
If you want to re-install the packages, navigate to the folder with the packages and input the following command in the terminal:

sudo dpkg -i *.deb

Thanks to abhiroop from The Ubuntu Forums for this beautiful workaround.

Pimp Up Your Ubuntu 08/02/2008

I was going to write a guide on how you can pimp up your ubuntu to give it blings and make it look sexy. then i can across a well written detailed guide on one .hence in other not to reinvent the wheel i decided to just post the linky to it

enjoy

http://linuxowns.wordpress.com/2008/06/16/guide-to-customizing-ubuntus-look-and-feel/