Month: February 2014

Installing Google Chrome on a Debian based distribution is actually pretty nice and easy… if you know how.

So lets get started. In the directory /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ create a file called google-chrome.list. Make sure that he extension is .list. The content of the file should be this:

deb http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main

After running apt-get update you will see an error message like this (the public key ID might change!):

W: GPG error: http://dl.google.com stable Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY A040830F7FAC5991

This is just telling you that you have to add Google’s key to your keychain. And here are the commands to do exactly that:

gpg --recv-keys A040830F7FAC5991
gpg --export -a A040830F7FAC5991 | sudo apt-key add -

Here is a sample output of that procedure:

root@majestix:/etc/apt/sources.list.d# gpg --recv-keys A040830F7FAC5991
gpg: requesting key 7FAC5991 from hkp server keys.gnupg.net
gpg: /root/.gnupg/trustdb.gpg: trustdb created
gpg: key 7FAC5991: public key "Google, Inc. Linux Package Signing Key " imported
gpg: no ultimately trusted keys found
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg: imported: 1
root@majestix:/etc/apt/sources.list.d# gpg --export -a A040830F7FAC5991 | sudo apt-key add -
OK
root@majestix:/etc/apt/sources.list.d# apt-get update
...

After that you can look for and install Google Chrome out of the apt repository:

root@majestix:/etc/apt/sources.list.d# apt-cache search google-chrome
google-chrome-beta - The web browser from Google
google-chrome-stable - The web browser from Google
google-chrome-unstable - The web browser from Google

I don’t know how anybody can work with focus on click. It is just a waste of time and energy. So it is really annoying to me that focus on click is always the default. And Unity has the same lack of configuration option as Gnome. You can’t switch the mouse focus mode with the standard settings.

To help that problem they finally have a UI that you can install with this command:

apt-get install unity-tweak-tool

When you now search for the unity-tweak-tool it will start and gives you a lot of missing options and settings to improve your workflow on your desktop. Stuff like configuring the launcher, panels, desktop switcher, mouse behavior, shortcuts, theme settings, etc.

This tool is a life savior for me and makes Unity actually a little bit more usable.

But there might be some stuff that is not in the tweak tool yet. In that case you can install the gconf editor:

apt-get install gconf-editor

You start it with the command gconf-editor. If you like poking around in the MS Windows registry, then this is your friend. It looks very similar and is a powerful tool to apply settings for which Canonical thought you don’t need a UI for.

Now, there is of course another tool that is helping you setting up Compiz, the composite manager. Most settings should be in the gconf editor, but you never know. So lets install that one as well and play around:

apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager

You invoke it with the command ccsm and have access to all the internal settings of Compiz.

And the CompizConfig settings manager,… wow, that is a mouthfull… That manager is the one that finally was able to resolve my issue with resizing windows. I like the quite common setting of using ALT+RightMouseButton to resize a window. and the Compiz settings manager is offering the setting.

In Window Management->Resize Window you can change exactly that behavior from the Ubuntu default middle mouse button to the right button. When you set it to the right mouse button (button 3) you might get a warning about a conflict with the Window Menu feature. I don’t need that one so I simply disabled it. And if I needed, then I can use the same tool to assign another key-mouse-button combination.

Now, why do you need next to the standard settings dialogs additional three tools to get just the basic setup going is something that most likely only some UI designers at Canonical know. But at least I have some tools to get to a usable workspace.

I guess more or less every Linux user has noticed that the official Adobe Acrobat Reader version is out of date and that Adobe has no intention to update it. So you are stuck with version 9.5.5, which is mostly okay especially when you need some features that are only available in the official reader.

And as a logical consequence, Ubuntu is not providing a package anymore in its newer releases. Especially when there are so many alternatives to the simple Reader functionality. But fear not, you can still install the Adobe’s Reader and there is even a .deb package on Adobe’s download site.

Because the package does not come through the standard repository you have to resolve the dependencies on your own… well, I mean tell apt to resolve the dependencies.

First install the package using the following command (change the file name as needed):

dpkg -i AdbeRdr9.5.5-1_i386linux_enu.deb

If you see error messages about the wrong architecture, then you work on a 64 bit system and dpkg needs a little hint.

dpkg -i --force-architecture AdbeRdr9.5.5-1_i386linux_enu.deb

Afterwards you should see error messages about missing dependencies. And now we fix them:

apt-get -f install

This should pull all missing libraries, install them and then wrap up the installation of the Acrobat Reader.

It seems that these steps are not enough on some 64 bit Kubuntu systems. You might have to install two additional libraries:

apt-get install libxml2:i386 lib32stdc++6

And now happy PDF reading… wait… can it be that easy? At least not on my Kubuntu 13.10. Reading on the screen is fine but printing is messed up. Every print out from the Reader scales down the output to about two-third of the original size. To make things worse, it does a really crappy job at scaling. The output is basically unreadable.