gOS on VirtualBox

gOS or “Good OS” is an operating system based on Ubuntu. What makes gOS special is it’s “mac” like look and feel, out of the box support for google apps like Gmail, Google Docs, Picasa, Youtube etc through a special mozilla application called prism.

gOS also provides skype, wine in the default installation. Since gOS is based on Ubuntu, ubuntu users will feel right at home when using gOS. All these facts prompted me to go after gOS.

I downloaded gOS after a lot of struggle from their website. They call the operating system as gOS gadgets which really confused me. Only after figuring out the size of the iso, I was convinced that I’m downloading the operating system. Also the website seems less informative and not well organized.

Keeping those things aside, let us quickly see how to install gOS as an guest in VirtualBox. Follow these steps to install gOS as a virtual machine in your VirtualBox:

Download the respective “iso” image from the gOS download site.

• Open VirtualBox, click “New” to add “gOS”as the virtual machine.
• Choose “Linux” as the operating system and “Ubuntu” as the version.
• Complete the rest of the virtual machine setup by giving appropriate details.
• Mount the gOS “iso” image in the CD/DVD ROM section of the new virtual machine you just created.
• Start the virtual machine and proceed with the installation.
• Once the installation is complete, boot into your gOS virtual machine.
• Once you boot into the gOS virtual machine, open the terminal and type “sudo apt-get install gcc make automake autoconf“. This will install the necessary build tools which is needed to install the virtualbox guest additions.
• Now click “Devices -> Install Guest Additions” to install the guest additions for this virtual machine.
• Once the guest additions are installed, restart your virtual machine. If the screen resolution of your virtual machine is still small, follow the steps mentioned in this tombuntu post and reboot your virtual machine.
• You can still go and configure things like “enabling smooth fonts” etc to make your experience with gOS pleasant.

Why there is no official Live CD for Microsoft Windows?

The first time I ever knew about a “Live CD” is when a friend gave me a “Ubuntu Live CD”. That was three years back and since then I’ve tried many versions of linux. Thanks to this concept, I was able to try and see how the operating system will look like, before rushing to install it on my hard disk. Sad that Microsoft never gives us this option “Try before you install”.

The Live CD’s helped me to evaluate various features offered by many linux distros. And there are some linux distros like “GParted Live”, “Knoppix” etc which are made specifically to run as Live CD.

So I wondered, “Is there a official Live CD for Windows?”. By seeing from what many linux distros have achieved, making a “Live CD” need not be rocket science. Even the smallest of linux distros provide “Live CD” option. Why not Microsoft, which has billions of dollars in it’s pocket?

As I was looking around in the web to find out more details, I found this interesting post from an Ubuntu forum:

“I rarely use the word “never”, because such statements are so often proven wrong. However, I think I’m fairly safe in saying that Windows will never have a LiveCD, because that would mean that any person could run Windows on any machine that can boot from the disc. And all someone would have to do is essentially copy the cd to a partition and make it bootable, and they have an installation of Windows. Microsoft would never allow that as long as Windows is a commercial product.

They don’t even like you to transfer your own paid-for copy of Windows to another computer you own. In what world would they ever produce a LiveCD???”

What do you think? Will Microsoft ever release a Live CD for Windows?

New kid NetBeans giving tough time to other PHP IDEs out there…

It seems, NetBeans has been making waves (or rather tsunami?) in the PHP world. According to the article “The Big PHP IDE Test“, NetBeans, a new kid to the PHP land is found to provide almost all the features of established commercial PHP IDEs like Aptana Pro ($99), Zend Studio ($399) at the best cost possible ($0)  .

Great news and thank you NetBeans team for making the “Only IDE you need” available to PHP folks with many advanced features.

Goosh – The fastest way to search NetBeans wiki?

Whether you are new to NetBeans or not, NetBeans wiki is a great place to find many NetBeans related tips and tricks. It is from here that I learned about installing NetBeans IDE in Ubuntu when I switched from Windows. Not only that, I keep coming back to these wikis whenever I need some help with NetBeans IDE.

But since NetBeans adoption is growing at such a rapid rate, it’s no surprise that the number of NetBeans wikis has grown exponentially too. Yes, there is an inbuilt search function to help you find what you want, but if you want to search something very quickly, then you might find goosh very useful.

Goosh is a shell or terminal or command line interface to access google services. To use goosh, just open your browser and then point it to “goosh.org“. Now you can search the NetBeans wiki pages damn quickly by entering the command “site wiki.netbeans.org <your search term>”. For example, if you want to find a solution to solve the garbled text problem you face when using NetBeans on Ubuntu, you would enter “site wiki.netbeans.org garbled text” in the goosh terminal.

You can find more information about goosh from my post, “Goosh – A fantastic front-end to Google Services”.

Goosh – A fantastic front-end to Google services

I recently came across a nice little tool called “goosh” or “The unofficial Google Shell”. It resembles a linux shell (or terminal) and provides a “command line interface” on the web for many google services. This means that you can just open and read your mails very fast by typing just 2 commands: “login” and then “gmail”. That’s it, your mails are loaded damn fast and this is what you might want if you are in a hurry!

And goosh provides some cool facilities like searching wikipedia, news, rss feeds, blogs etc etc with simple to use (and remember) commands. Let’s see some of goosh’s firepower in action.

This is what you might see when you load goosh initially.

Getting NetBeans ready for work on Ubuntu 8.10

Now that you have upgraded from Windows to Ubuntu (like me ), let’s see how to setup NetBeans quickly on your new Ubuntu machine without wasting much time.

Step 1: Install JDK

Install jdk on your machine using the super easy install option in Ubuntu. Open the terminal and type:

 
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk
 

This will install the latest jdk available in the Ubuntu repository. This is cool because, you need not worry about updating your jdk whenever a new release is available. Your system’s “Update Manager” will take care of the rest.

Once the jdk is downloaded, you will be prompted to agree a license agreement in the terminal. Press “TAB” key to select the “Ok” option and then press “Enter”.

Finally, my blog appeared in planetnetbeans…!

Long long ago (about 6 months back), I registered my blog in planetnetbeans.org. Whenever I post a blog entry about netbeans and file it in my “netbeans” category, I use to check whether it appears in planetnetbeans.org. It never appeared.

I even sent a mail to the support team explaining my frustration. They asked me to register my blog again. I did exactly the same. Another 3 months passed without any fruitful result.

To my surprise, as I was casually surfing planetnetbeans.org today, I found my blog being listed there.

See u guys with some interesting stuff soon…

Ubuntu Network File System

I recently came across a scenario where I wanted to access the NetBeans projects located in another computer. That was a Ubuntu machine as well so I naturally went for the “Remote Desktop Viewer” (since I’m used to it when I was using Windows) feature available in my Ubuntu and opened NetBeans IDE in the remote machine to work with the projects. That was painfully slow, so I went to the “Terminal Server Client” with the protocol as “VNC”. Not much difference. These options were ok to just connect to a remote machine and perform simple operations. But when you want to work on a set of files for a long period of time inside an IDE, that’s a different story.

I use keyboard shortcuts heavily in NetBeans IDE and whenever I issue a series of commans via the keyboard, the remote desktop connection went havoc and got struck inbetween. I had to periodically disconnect and connect to the remote session again which was really painful.

Here my need is to access a set of files located in another machine. I really don’t want to view the desktop of the remote machine nor need to run some applications from there. So I was looking for other options and came across a really fantastic concept called Network File System or shortly NFS.

Nimbus – A great theme for Ubuntu

I recently tried the cool and fresh “nimbus” theme (which is the default theme on OpenSolaris) on my Ubuntu 8.10. It’s really pleasant and relaxing. And run NetBeans with “nimbus” look and feel explicitly set to have a really pleasing effect. And here are some screenshots from my Ubuntu:

You can get the nimbus icons and themes from gnome-look.org. Just download the “icon” and “gtk-engine” debs and run it. (TIP: First install the “icon” deb)

Ubuntu 8.10 – A Productive Java Development Environment

I recently started using Ubuntu 8.10 at my workplace as well. Till then, I have been using Ubuntu only at home. For me, Ubuntu@Work was very different from Ubuntu@Home. I mostly surf, blog, listen to music and play some games at home. But Ubuntu@Work was a completely different scenario.

Since I’m new to this linux stuff, it took me some time to configure things like static ip address, host names etc. But once everything was setup, things started moving quickly. I initially had doubt in my minds about the font rendering of NetBeans (or any swing app for that matter) under linux. I even wrote an post showing my frustration with NetBeans font rendering when compared to Eclipse. But with jdk.1.6.10, font rendering is smooth and NetBeans works like a champ! You can see some samples here: