Ubuntu

How You Can Change the Cursor Theme on Your Ubuntu Desktop

Suparna Ganguly — Tue, 07 Jun 2022 16:00:00 +0000

Are you finding an alternative for your default Yaru cursor themes on Ubuntu? This article is where you’ll get to know about the procedure of changing and installing cursor themes on Ubuntu. So, read on and find out.

Change the Cursor Themes Using GNOME Tweak

To change the mouse pointer theme on Ubuntu, open the Software app. Then, look out for the GNOME Tweaks tool. GNOME Tweaks is one of the most-used configuration tools to manage the GNOME desktop. So, install the same, without any delay.

After installing GNOME Tweaks, navigate to the top-left ‘Activities’ overview. Go to GNOME Tweaks and open it. Once you open GNOME Tweaks, go to the Appearance option from the left pane. Choose a different cursor theme from the drop-down menu.

Note: Since Ubuntu is the default Linux distribution for GNOME Desktops, you can apply this method for other distributions as well, including Debian, CentOS, Fedora, SUSE Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and other GNOME-based Linux distros.

5 Beautiful Cursor Themes for Ubuntu

There might not be plenty of cursor themes available. But, you can always install any of them from the internet. Below are some of the most excellent cursor themes to choose from.

Oreo Cursors

Oreo offers colored cursors with cute animations. They have 64 px and 32 px with HiDPI (High Dots Per Inch) display support for Linux desktops. You can get more than 10 varieties in the colors of the cursors. The icon theme comprises various states of a cursor within the cursor icon itself. If you find the Oreo Cursors attractive, you can get them here.

Bibata Cursors

Another favorite cursor theme is Bibata. Bibata Cursors is a modern-style cursor theme available for Ubuntu. And it comes in three different options: Classic, Ice, and Amber. Bibata supports HiDPI Display also. Each of the themes of Bibata has round and sharp edge icons. If you want Bibata Cursors for your Linux desktop, find them here.

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GIMP in a Pinch: Life after Desktop

Alex Lee — Mon, 25 Apr 2022 16:00:00 +0000

by Alex Lee

So my Dell XPS 13 DE laptop running Ubuntu died on me today. Let’s just say I probably should not have attempted to be efficient and take a bath and work at the same time!

Unfortunately, as life always seems to be, you always need something at a time that you don’t have it and that is the case today. I have some pictures that I need to edit for a website, and I only know and use GIMP. I took a look at my PC inventory at home, and I had two options:

Macbook Air: My roommate’s computer
HP Chromebook 11: A phase of my life where I attempted to streamline my life and simplify which lasted two weeks

My roommate was using his computer, so it really only left me with one option, the chromebook. I also did not have a desire to learn another OS today as I have done enough distro hopping in the last few months. I charged and booted up the chromebook and started to figure out how I could get GIMP onto it. Interestingly enough, there are not many clear cut options to running GIMP on an Android device. There was an option to run a Linux developer environment on the chromebook, but it required 10GB of space which I didn’t have. Therefore, option two was to find an app on the Google Play Store.

Typing GIMP brought me to an app called XGimp Image Editor from DMobileAndroid, and I installed and loaded it with an image to only find this:

This definitely is nothing like GIMP and appeared to be very limited in functionality anyway. I could see why it had garnered a 1.4 star rating as it definitely is not what someone would expect when they are looking for something similar to GIMP.

So I took a look at the other options, and there was another app called GIMP from Userland Technologies. It does cost $1.99, but it was a one-time charge and seemed to be the only other option on the Play Store. Reviewing the screenshots and the description of the application seemed to suggest that this would be the actual GIMP app that I was using on my desktop so I went ahead and downloaded it. Installation was relatively quick, and I started running it and to my surprise, here is what I saw:

It appears that the application basically is a Linux desktop build that automatically launches the desktop version of GIMP. Therefore, it really is GIMP. I loaded up an image which was also relatively easy to do as it seamlessly connected to my folders on my chromebook.

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Installing Ubuntu with Two Hard Drives

Tedley Meralus — Tue, 29 Sep 2020 23:12:39 +0000

by Tedley Meralus

Many computers these days come with two hard drives, one SSD for fast boot speeds, and one that can be used for storage. My Dell G5 gaming laptop is a great example with a 128GB NAND SSD and a 1TB SSD. When building out a Linux installation I have a few options. Option 1: Follow the steps and install Ubuntu on one SSD hard drive for quick boot times and better speed performance when opening files or moving data. Then mounting the second drive and copying files to it when I want to backup files or need to move files off the first drive. Or, Option 2: install Ubuntu on an older hard drive with more storage but slower start up speeds and use the 128GB as a small mount point.

However, as most Linux users are aware, solid state drives are much faster, and files, folders, and drives on a Linux system all have mount points that can be setup with ease.

In this article we’ll go over how to install Ubuntu Linux with separate /root and /home directories on two separate drives – with root folder on the SSD and home folder on the 1TB hard drive. This allows me to leverage the boot times and speed of the 128GB SSD and still have plenty of space to install steam games or large applications.

This guide can also be used for other use cases as well. An example would be old or cheaper laptops that don't have hard drives with high RPM spinning SSDs. If your computer is a bit on the older side (and has an SD card slot) but you want to utilize faster boot times, you can go out and buy an SD card and install the /root partition onto that for quick boot times, and the /home partition on the main drive for storage. This guide, like Linux, can be used for many other use cases as well.

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Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure: an Interview with Canonical

Petros Koutoupis — Thu, 09 May 2019 12:00:00 +0000

by Petros Koutoupis

On April 29, 2019, Canonical made headlines by officially announcing the availability of Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure If you are unfamiliar with Canonical and the work that they do:

Canonical is the publisher of Ubuntu, the OS for most public cloud workloads as well as the emerging categories of smart gateways, self-driving cars and advanced robots. Canonical provides enterprise security, support and services to commercial users of Ubuntu.

Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure changes the entire landscape of service offerings for open-source software. Instead of itemizing and charging for each and every component or add-on, Canonical promises its customers a per-node service package, regardless of the technologies running on it. I was able to sit down and chat with Stephan Fabel, who was generous enough to provide a bit more detail around this exciting announcement.

Petros Koutoupis: Tell us about yourself.

Stephan Fabel: My name is Stephan Fabel, and I am Director of Product over at Canonical. So, I am running a team as the Product Manager, and I am responsible for the portfolio of products that go out to our customers.

Petros: For our readers who are unfamiliar, what is Ubuntu Advantage?

Stephan: As you might know, Ubuntu always has been freely available as an open-source Linux distribution for everybody to consume. And, for those users who wish to enter that commercial relationship with Canonical, either because they are interested in our additional bit-streams that we offer like kernel patches, extended security maintenance, FIPS compliance crypto libraries, or because they would like to get support for each of those open infrastructure components that we are covering, Ubuntu Advantage is the program that they would subscribe to.

Petros: What makes this recent announcement of Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure so exciting?

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Review: the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition Laptop

Petros Koutoupis — Mon, 12 Nov 2018 13:00:00 +0000

by Petros Koutoupis

A look at Dell's thin and sleek XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop that now ships with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS pre-installed.

Canonical recently made an official announcement on its company blog stating that the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop (that is, Project Sputnik) now ships with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) pre-installed. Upon reading this, I quickly reached out to Dell asking to review the laptop. I'm a Linux developer, and when a developer edition laptop is marketed with Linux pre-installed, I need to experience it for myself. The laptop eventually arrived, and like a child on Christmas morning, I excitedly pulled the device out of the box and powered it up for the first time.

This is a pretty rock-solid notebook. The device is very light and easy to carry—meaning, it's mobile (which is very important in my book), thin and sleek. Not only does the device look good, but it also performs very well.

General Specifications

In my possession is the 7th generation of the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop. This generation ships with an Intel Core i7 8th Gen microprocessor. It is a four-core, eight-threaded (hyperthreaded) i7-8550U CPU operating at a 1.8GHz frequency. With this configuration, the system itself reports eight CPUs. The system is installed with 16GB of RAM.

First Impressions

Upon first boot, you're greeted with a Dell welcome screen followed by a generic set of Ubuntu-related questions (such as license agreement, keyboard layouts, timezone and so on). Toward the end, you are given an option to create a recovery USB image, which could be very handy one day. If you opt out of creating one, no worries, you can go back and create one at a later time.

Figure 1. The Dell Recovery Media Menu

The first thing I did, after logging in to my user session for the very first time, was run a software update.

Although this does not at all relate to the quality of the device, I did find it a bit strange that the operating system was pre-installed with both Chrome and Chromium web browsers. I'm not sure why anyone would need both, but they both were there. If you're a Firefox user, you'll need to install it from the Ubuntu Software center.

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Ubuntu Desktop in the Hyper-V Gallery, an Interview with Canonical and Microsoft

Petros Koutoupis — Fri, 26 Oct 2018 13:08:08 +0000

by Petros Koutoupis

Late last month, Canonical made an astonishing announcement: an optimized image of Ubuntu Desktop is now available from Microsoft's Hyper-V gallery. This wonderful new feature is primarily intended for Windows 10 Pro desktop users needing to run Ubuntu Desktop guest virtual machines.

Although the announcement itself came as a bit of a surprise, even more so when you consider the long tumultuous history between both Microsoft and Linux, it does, however, indicate that times (and the company) have been changing. In recent years, Microsoft has been making a concerted effort to embrace open source and open-source technologies.

The announcement did leave me with a few questions, so I took the opportunity to sit down with Will Cooke, the Engineering Director for Ubuntu Desktop at Canonical, and Sarah Cooley, Program Manager at Microsoft.

Petros Koutoupis: Please introduce yourselves and describe your primary role both at your company and for this project.

Will Cooke: I am the director of engineering for Ubuntu Desktop at Canonical. Our team is responsible for putting together every Ubuntu Desktop release, selecting which packages and which features we're going to ship, making sure that each release is of the right quality and working with partners on projects around Ubuntu Desktop—for example, OEMs shipping Ubuntu Desktop on their hardware and, in this instance, Microsoft, to improve the virtual guest experience for Ubuntu Desktop on Windows 10. For this project, I worked with our internal teams to line up the requirements for supporting the enhanced session and to make sure the features we needed would be included in 18.04 LTS and with Microsoft engineers and product managers to make sure we were always in sync on the latest progress.

Sarah Cooley: I am a program manager on the virtualization team at Microsoft. We have been working closely with the developer platform team in Microsoft, Will Cooke's team in Canonical, and xRDP's community to improve the Linux virtual machine experience on Windows 10—starting with Ubuntu. To provide the experience you see today, Hyper-V developers contributed to xRDP to make sure open source communities can run Linux virtual machines in enhanced session mode while working with Canonical to provide all of the tools necessary for Ubuntu to run well with Hyper-V with no additional setup. Outside this effort, I also work on the Windows Subsystem for Linux and Linux containers on Windows.

PK: Why Hyper-V and why Ubuntu Desktop?

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Have a Plan for Netplan

Shawn Powers — Tue, 16 Oct 2018 13:08:08 +0000

by Shawn Powers

Ubuntu changed networking. Embrace the YAML.

If I'm being completely honest, I still dislike the switch from eth0, eth1, eth2 to names like, enp3s0, enp4s0, enp5s0. I've learned to accept it and mutter to myself while I type in unfamiliar interface names. Then I installed the new LTS version of Ubuntu and typed vi /etc/network/interfaces. Yikes. After a technological lifetime of entering my server's IP information in a simple text file, that's no longer how things are done. Sigh. The good news is that while figuring out Netplan for both desktop and server environments, I fixed a nagging DNS issue I've had for years (more on that later).

The Basics of Netplan

The old way of configuring Debian-based network interfaces was based on the ifupdown package. The new default is called Netplan, and although it's not terribly difficult to use, it's drastically different. Netplan is sort of the interface used to configure the back-end dæmons that actually configure the interfaces. Right now, the back ends supported are NetworkManager and networkd.

If you tell Netplan to use NetworkManager, all interface configuration control is handed off to the GUI interface on the desktop. The NetworkManager program itself hasn't changed; it's the same GUI-based interface configuration system you've likely used for years.

If you tell Netplan to use networkd, systemd itself handles the interface configurations. Configuration is still done with Netplan files, but once "applied", Netplan creates the back-end configurations systemd requires. The Netplan files are vastly different from the old /etc/network/interfaces file, but it uses YAML syntax, and it's pretty easy to figure out.

The Desktop and DNS

If you install a GUI version of Ubuntu, Netplan is configured with NetworkManager as the back end by default. Your system should get IP information via DHCP or static entries you add via GUI. This is usually not an issue, but I've had a terrible time with my split-DNS setup and systemd-resolved. I'm sure there is a magical combination of configuration files that will make things work, but I've spent a lot of time, and it always behaves a little oddly. With my internal DNS server resolving domain names differently from external DNS servers (that is, split-DNS), I get random lookup failures. Sometimes ping will resolve, but dig will not. Sometimes the internal A record will resolve, but a CNAME will not. Sometimes I get resolution from an external DNS server (from the internet), even though I never configure anything other than the internal DNS!

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Why the Failure to Conquer the Desktop Was Great for GNU/Linux

Glyn Moody — Mon, 06 Aug 2018 11:30:00 +0000

by Glyn Moody

AI: open source's next big win.

Canonical recently launched Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. It's an important release. In part, that's because Canonical will support it for five years, making it one of the relatively rare LTS products in Ubuntu's history. Ubuntu 18.04 also marks a high-profile return to GNOME as the default desktop, after a few years of controversial experimentation with Unity. The result is regarded by many as the best desktop Ubuntu so far (that's my view too, for what it's worth). And yet, the emphasis at launch lay elsewhere. Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical and founder of Ubuntu, said:

Multi-cloud operations are the new normal. Boot-time and performance-optimised images of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on every major public cloud make it the fastest and most efficient OS for cloud computing, especially for storage and compute-intensive tasks like machine learning.

The bulk of the official 18.04 LTS announcement is about Ubuntu's cloud computing features. On the main web site, Ubuntu claims to be "The standard OS for cloud computing", citing (slightly old) research that shows "70% of public cloud workloads and 54% of OpenStack clouds" use it. Since Canonical is a privately held company, it doesn't publish a detailed breakdown of its operations, just a basic summary. That means it's hard to tell just how successful the cloud computing strategy is proving. But, the fact that Shuttleworth is now openly talking about an IPO—not something to be undertaken lightly—suggests that there is enough good news to convince investors to throw plenty of money at Canonical when the prospectus spells out how the business is doing.

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Embracing Snaps: an Interview with Canonical and Slack

Petros Koutoupis — Wed, 27 Jun 2018 12:00:00 +0000

by Petros Koutoupis

This year was a big one for companies like Canonical and Slack. It also was a big year for technologies that Canonical created to enable third-party application support—specifically, the snap package.

I'm sure most, if not all, of you have heard about this package manager. In fact, it's been around since at least 2014, but it initially was developed around Canonical's Ubuntu phone operating system. Now, although the phone operating system has since been canceled, snaps continue to dominate the operating system, in both the server and desktop space.

What Is a Snap?

A "snap" application package is a self-contained piece of software, and although it originally was designed to be hosted on Ubuntu, the package will work across a range of other Linux distributions. This isn't your traditional APT or YUM manager hosting DEB and RPM (or other) package formats.

Again, the appeal to snap packages is that they are self-contained (that is, containerized). They are designed to auto-update and are safe to run. A snap package is bundled with its dependencies, which is what allows it to run on all other major Linux distribution without any modification. It also doesn't have any dependency to any package manager or application store. But, don't misunderstand this—a package manager or application store still can host one or more snap packages; however, the snap package is not dependent to that manager.

Snapcraft is the official tool for software developers to package their software programs in a Snap format.

Sitting Down with Canonical and Slack

Earlier this year on January 18th, Canonical announced the first iteration of Slack as a snap. But, why was this announcement so important? I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Evan Dandrea of Canonical and Felix Riesberg of Slack. They gave me the answers I was looking for.

Evan's team at Canonical builds the platform to make everyone's life easier—that is, Snapcraft. And Felix's team leverages that very same platform to bring wonderful applications, such as Slack, to your Linux desktop.

First, for those not familiar with Slack, it's an enterprise software platform that allows teams and businesses (of all sizes) to communicate effectively. It's organized, easily accessible, and more important, it allows for better and more efficient communication than email. Slack isn't limited to just professional use; it also can be adopted for more personal uses.

The Interview

Petros Koutoupis: Why snap?

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Ubuntu Linux and Bash as a Windows Program!

Dave Taylor — Fri, 23 Feb 2018 17:16:02 +0000

by Dave Taylor

An Ubuntu Bash shell as a Windows app? Fantastic! Here's how to proceed.

Microsoft has ruled the operating system world for many years, and it's staggering to see how many computers run Microsoft Windows in all its many variants. In May 2017, Microsoft announced it had an installed base of 1.4 billion. Sure, there also are much more than a billion devices now running Android, but if you're running a desktop or laptop computer, odds remain that it's running some version of Microsoft Windows.

Microsoft hasn't just ignored the rest of the OS world—although it sure took a long time for them to bail on Windows Mobile and accept Android—so it was with delight that I read that the next version of Windows 10 would include a simple app that lets you run a Linux shell.

No hassles with complex installations, no dual booting, no virtual machines you need to configure—just a simple app to find in the Microsoft Store and a program to click and run whenever you want to expand your knowledge of Bash or Linux.

Sort of.

At the time of this writing, the app requires that you're in the early release program (it's free to join, and you'll become a beta tester for the next version of Windows 10), but once you're signed up and running the early release version, it is indeed a download-and-go program.

By the time you read this article, however, what I'm running as an early release of Win10 should be the latest public update, so that roadblock will vanish.

To get started, you'll need to enable the Windows Subsystem for Linux (which also lets you run other flavors of Linux and is pretty cool), but start by searching in the Microsoft Store for "Ubuntu" to find Ubuntu Linux on Windows. The latest version of Ubuntu is supported in the app too: 16.04 LTS.

Click to launch it once installed, and you'll be confronted with a window like the one shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Ubuntu as a Windows App? Excellent!

It's interesting to note that some standard Linux commands return nothing—like who am i—but most of them work fine, and there even are dot files in my newly created home directory /home/taylor.

This is a Bash login shell. You can confirm your own shell a couple different ways, but I like this command: ps $$.

Are you curious about how the system identifies itself? uname -a is the standard Linux command to get the version, which reveals this interesting info:

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