1. Price

Of course the price is great. You simply can’t beat free. Many people think, “you get what you pay for“, but that’s not entirely true. For instance, even most Windows users will say that Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome are the best browsers out there. How much do you pay for those? That right, they’re free. Although these are free, that doesn’t mean there aren’t some really good developers behind the software.

2. Software Management

One of my favorite features of Ubuntu is its software management. This is especially true when it comes to updates. In Windows, it could turn into an all-day job just to update the operating system, and then all the software you have installed because you have to go to Windows Updates and the websites for all of your installed software. Some programs might have an update system built into the software, but I still say it’s not as nice as updating everything in a single place at a single time. All of the software is available for install from the same place as well. When you decide you need a new program for keeping track of your bank account, it’s just a case of opening your favorite package manager and installing it from there.

3. Choices

Since Linux is open source, there are a ton of choices and options. This can be daunting to some people who like simple. It can be very simple. It’s even a choice to have choices. You can go to Ubuntu’s website, download the latest release, install it, and enjoy the operating system with its default set of software. However, you can also dig deeper and change nearly everything. Whether it’s the desktop environment, email client, look and feel of everything, or nearly anything else you want, the options are there. Unlike Windows, you can even change the default file manager. If you don’t like Windows Explorer, you can’t exactly ditch it and use a different file manager. In Linux, you can use the default file manager if you like, which Nautilus is a great file manager in itself, or you can install something else (like Marlin) and set it as default. Simple as that.

4. Customizing

It’s nice to be able to customize something when you don’t like the defaults. You can change nearly any aspect of the operating system, as I mentioned. This can be done through themes, color schemes, widgets, change of software, or pretty much any other way. In an earlier article, I told you how to move the navigation buttons to the left of the address bar in Nautilus 3+. Most customizations aren’t that involved, but due to the young nature of the latest versions of Gnome and Nautilus, some options aren’t supported yet. Overall, if something isn’t to your liking, it’s usually easy enough to change it to what you want.

5. Support

People may think different things when the word “support” is mentioned. Some people will think, “I need help, where do I go?“, while others will think, “Does my 3G modem work with it?“. Both are valid concepts of support, and both are really good in Linux. It’s easy to get help with Linux. If you have a problem, there are many forums and chat rooms you can use to get help. Ubuntu Forums is possibly the best place to get help with anything related to Ubuntu, its derivatives, and its software. If a more general forum would be better suited for you, LinuxQuestions.org is the place to go.

When it comes to hardware support, that can be a tricky subject to tackle from either the user’s aspect, or the developer’s. Some hardware is supported by Linux, while some hardware manufacturers support Linux. Things that aren’t supported in either direction are usually being handled the best they can in some way or another. The Linux community is big, and I mean really big. That means that if there’s a piece of hardware out there, it’s bound to be in the hands of a Linux user or developer. If it’s not already supported in some way, it’s probably being worked on by someone in the world. Even if something is already supported, there’s probably someone working on making it easier to work with, no matter how well it already works. The goal is to make everything work, and make it as easy as possible to do. That seems like a very noble goal, especially when it’s such a big task with some hardware.

6. Bug Handling

This actually goes in with support, but it’s done well enough to be mentioned separately. There are many ways to file a bug report. Ubuntu even has bug reporting built into the operating system. When you find something wrong with the software and you file a bug report, it will be verified and assigned to a developer to be fixed in the next release of the software. If it’s big enough, it could even justify a bug fix release on its own.

At the same time, there’s also feature suggestions. Most open source software has a way to make suggestions for improving the software. Nobody knows a user’s needs and desires like a user, so if you find something missing from your software choice, make a suggestion. This is one of the best ways for developers to know what they need to add to their software, and in most cases, they like to get that feedback.

7. Community

As I mentioned before, the Linux community is really big. It’s not hard to go into the Ubuntu IRC chat room and find over 1000 users online. These people are there to get or give help, or just to talk about Ubuntu-related stuff. There are even Linux User Groups (LUGs) all over the world. There’s a good chance you can find one near you, or you can even organize a group of your own. With how the Internet works, it’s easy to create an online community for your area, organize meetings, create forums, chat rooms, host install parties, and much more. If you have a verified group, you can even get free or discounted stuff from different places to help promote Linux and open source software.

There are also many blogs out there, like Make Tech Easier, that post articles to help you along the way. Most of the time, if you can’t figure out how to do something, you can usually find the answer on a blog of some sort listed in Google’s search results. In the spirit of open source, users will often volunteer their time and knowledge to be shared with others.

Conclusion

There are a lot of things to like about Linux. It’s not just Ubuntu, but most distributions offer a lot of things to like. There are a lot of people that are passionate about open source software, and the developers volunteer their time to make it all better. In the end, it all boils down to the community that surrounds Linux. If it wasn’t for the community, Linux wouldn’t be as good as it is. You can expect Linux to get even better as the community grows over time.

What are some of your favorite parts of Linux? Let us know what you have to say in the comments.

The post Why Linux? 7 Reasons That Make Linux Great appeared first on Make Tech Easier.

The Script

Using a Bash script is the easiest way to clear your history. You can have it do nearly anything you could want. Since the point is to clear your recent items, we’ll make a script that will delete the files.

To do this, open gedit and use the following commands to create the script:

#!/bin/bash 
## Clear recently accessed files
rm -f ~/.recently-used.xbel
rm -f ~/.recently-used.xbel.*
rm -f ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel
rm -f ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel.*

This is very simple and removes the recently used items from most GTK-based programs. If you want to go another step and remove thumbnails as well, that’s just one line of code away. Just add:

rm -rf ~/.thumbnails/*

Once you have that done, it should look like this:

Now, just save the file as something like clearhistory.sh. The .sh extension signifies that it is a shell script. To make it executable, right-click on the file and open the “Properties” window. In the Permissions tab, check to box next to where it says “Allow executing file as program“.

Click “Close”, and you’re done.

Placing The Script

If you only want this available to you, on demand, you can either keep it as a file or put the file somewhere safe and keep it as a menu entry. If you want to keep the script itself hidden, create a hidden folder in your home folder like .MyScripts. Be sure to start the folder name with a period to make it hidden by default. Put the file in there.

TIP: You can show/hide hidden folders like these by pressing CTRL+H in Nautilus.

To create a menu entry for it, open your applications menu and find the Main Menu program.

Click on the Category or menu folder you want it to be in on the left, click New Entry and fill in the information. It can be ran either as an application or from the terminal. You can choose this from the first drop-down menu. It does the same thing either way, except you will see a terminal window flash if you select Application in Terminal. You can also give it an icon by clicking on the launcher icon in the upper-left corner of the window.

Now, type in the path to where you put the file. If it is located somewhere in your home folder, you can start the path with “~” like ~/.MyScripts/clearhistory.sh. You can also add a comment to the launcher so you can remember exactly what it does. The comment is displayed as a tooltip where it applies. When you are finished, it should look something like this:

Click OK to close and save the new menu item, and you can close the menu editor. Now, it will be available to you in the application menu. That means you can also add it to your favorites if you want it to be even easier to get to.

Automatically Clear Your History

If you would rather have your history items cleared automatically, place the script in ~/.config/autostart. Everything in this folder will run automatically every time you login. This takes the effort out of the process. However, if you only put it here, it will not be cleared in the middle of any session, so if you want to still be able to do it manually, you can have the menu entry point to the script in the autostart folder.

Another thing to note is that this will only work for the current user. If you have multiple user accounts you want to do this with, you would have to place the file and menu entry in the same way in any other accounts you want it available in. Or, you can have it done automatically at shutdown, which can easily clear the history system-wide.

System-wide On Shutdown

This part is a little more involved, but it can also simplify the process if you want to use it on multiple accounts. To start, open the Run command by pressing ALT+F2 and type:

gksudo gedit /etc/init.d/clearallhistory.sh

This will open gedit as root so you can save the file to the system directory. You can also name the file something other than clearallhistory.sh if you like, but remember to keep the .sh extension. You can copy the code from the original script and change it from there by changing ~/ to /home/*/ like this:

#!/bin/bash
## Clear recently accessed files and thumbnails
rm -f /home/*/.recently-used.xbel
rm -f /home/*/.recently-used.xbel.*
rm -f /home/*/.local/share/recently-used.xbel
rm -f /home/*/.local/share/recently-used.xbel.*
rm -rf /home/*/.thumbnails/*

The asterisk (*) is used as a wildcard, so it will follow all paths in the /home/ folder to remove the history files. Once you have the code in place, save and close.

Now, you need to open the terminal to do the rest of this part. First, you need to make the script executable. Since it’s in the system directory, you can’t do it as a standard user, so that is why the terminal is being used here. Type the command:

sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/clearallhistory.sh

This will set the script as executable and you can continue. Now you need to link it to the proper places by using these commands:

sudo ln -sf /etc/init.d/clearallhistory.sh /etc/rc0.d/S10clearallhistory.sh
sudo ln -sf /etc/init.d/clearallhistory.sh /etc/rc6.d/S10clearallhistory.sh

This puts a link to the file in the folders of things that are automatically ran on shutdown and restart. You will notice that in the rc0.d and rc6.d folders, the file name starts with “S10″. This is because the scripts in this folder are ran in order of their filenames. The lower the number, the earlier it is ran. By default, Ubuntu ships with scripts starting at S20 in these folders.

If you decide to edit this script in the future, you will only need to do so to /etc/init.d/clearallhistory.sh because the other two locations are only linked to this one.

Specific Users On Shutdown

If you don’t want the history cleared from all accounts on shutdown, you will still use the above process, but you will need to change the script a bit. Instead of using the * wildcard, you will need to create a new command for each user you want cleaned. Each command should look something like this:

rm -f /home/josh/.recently-used.xbel
rm -f /home/amanda/.recently-used.xbel

This should be repeated for every command you want ran on each account you want it ran on.

Conclusion

Whatever your reason for wanting a clean history on your computer, this will make it work for you. If you followed the entire process, you should now have the script in the autostart folder in your profile, in the application menu, and in the shutdown/restart scripts folders.

Does this work for you, or do you want another method? Maybe you already have another method. Let us know what you have to say in the comments.

The post How to Remove Recent History Lists In Ubuntu 11.10 appeared first on Make Tech Easier.

Preparation

If you are not comfortable with compiling from source code, you should probably avoid this tutorial. I have not seen any other method available to do the job.

The first thing to do is enable the source code repository. In Ubuntu, you can do this by opening your application menu and search for Software Sources. Here, all you need to do is check the box for “Source Code” and click close. This will enable the source code repositories along with some other features that will help you along the way.

Open your home directory and create a new folder. For the purpose of this tutorial, I’ll call it “nautilus-custom“. Now, it’s time to open the terminal and do the rest of the work.

Since all we did in with the Software Sources editor was enable the Source Code repository, the repository listing still needs to be updated, so run:

sudo apt-get update

Move to the “nautilus-custom” folder before downloading the source:

cd nautilus-custom

Now that it’s updated, we need to download the source code for nautilus. This part does not need to be done as root, so you won’t need to use “sudo” in the command:

apt-get source nautilus

It will download the source packages for Nautilus and you will see some text flowing. Once it is finished, you may want to check to make sure that the source package was extracted by going into the nautilus-custom folder in your file manager. There should be a folder in there called “nautilus-3.2.1″, or whatever version is current. If it is not there, right-click on the “nautilus_3.2.1.orig.tar.bz2″ file and click “Extract Here”. That will extract the source files in the “nautilus-3.2.1″ folder I mentioned.

Compiling

Back to the terminal. If you haven’t compiled anything from source before, you will need some extra packages installed to allow you to do so. Even if you have compiled from source before, you should probably run this to make sure you have everything needed to compile Nautilus.

sudo apt-get build-dep nautilus

That installs everything needed to compile Nautilus. Now that you have everything needed, it’s time to move to the source code folder. You should already be in the “nautilus-custom” folder in the terminal, so you can use:

cd nautilus-3.2.1

The folder will be named differently if it is a different version, so it could be “nautilus-3.2.5″ in the future. Change the command accordingly. The code needs to be changed slightly to move the navigation buttons to the left. You neeNautilusNav-buttonsd to open the source file for the toolbar:

gedit src/nautilus-toolbar.c

You can either scroll down to line 132 (in version 3.2.1), or search for “gtk_toolbar_insert (GTK_TOOLBAR (self->priv->toolbar), item, 0)” (without quotes). At the end of that line, it has a “0″. Change it to a “2″, as in this picture:

Save the file and close Gedit. Now, it’s time to compile and install.

The first step in compiling the source code is to configure the build:

./configure --prefix=/usr

Than to build it:

make

Since in can’t be installed while it is already running (which could cause some problems), you need to stop all nautilus processes:

sudo killall nautilus

Installing

Now to install:

sudo make install

Once it finishes, it’s time to check that it worked:

nautilus &

The navigation buttons should be on the left side like this:

To prevent problems, you should either logout and back in, or just restart the computer. If at some point you want the navigation buttons moved back to the right side, just run:

sudo apt-get --reinstall install nautilus

That will install the stock Nautilus from the Ubuntu repositories. If Nautilus gets updated with the regular software updates, you will lose the positioning, so you will need to repeat this process every time for future versions.

Conclusion

This isn’t exactly a convenient way to do this job, but hopefully it will become an option in either the standard settings or even with Ubuntu Tweak in the near future.

Did this work for you? Do you have an easier way to do it? Let us know in the comments.

The post Move The Navigation Buttons Back To The Left In Nautilus 3+ [Linux] appeared first on Make Tech Easier.