Most of the monitors have a poor contrast with light shades of grey and whites. It gets irritating when you have to find the scrollbar while going through long pages in Chromium browser for Ubuntu. The scrollbar looks something like this before and after the fix.

Before

After

Using Gnome color chooser doesn’t change it in Chromium. The Google Chrome extension specifically for Ubuntu Chromium users helps rectify this problem. Though a lot of incompatibility and crashes are reported in the comments, I had incompatibility wit some sites but no crashes yet. [EXTENTION]

This makes the scrollbar blue like the blue clear looks style. The vivid blue on grey makes spotting it easy on long pages also.

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Wine lets you run windows program in your linux installation. Similarly andlinux lets you run Linux programs on windows. Andlinux is a complete linux distro in itself. Its almost like a WUBI installation of linux.

HowToGeek provides a complete detailed guide (with screenshots for each step) on “How to install and use andlinux”

[DOWNLOAD]

Google introduced a public global DNS (domain name system). Its free to use. What more? It has a non-messy address:

8.8.8.8   OR    8.8.4.4

Advantages:

• Speed up your browsing experience.
• Improve your security.
• Get the results you expect with absolutely no redirection.

So what’s all the fuss about, huh? Well, like google says “The DNS protocol is an important part of the web’s infrastructure, serving as the Internet’s phone book: every time you visit a website, your computer performs a DNS lookup. Complex pages often require multiple DNS lookups before they start loading, so your computer may be performing hundreds of lookups a day.“  [Here]

Setting it up:

Now comes the important part, setting it up! Using it to speed up your internet. How to Geek explains it in a detailed manner (with couple of screenshots). It covers setting the new public DNS for vista (almost the same for XP), Ubuntu and also adding the DNS to your DSL router. MacOSX users may go HERE for a setup guide.

Need DNS telephone support? Call google:

• 877-590-4367 in the U.S.
• 770-200-1201 outside the U.S.

Completed my Ubuntu 9.04 copy download early in the morning, took a huge 6 hrs to complete due to no indian mirror. My DVD drive stopped working. Other than virtual disk (Daemon tools ) I had no other way to install it through WUBI. First new thing i noticed was the new loading bar with animated grungy texture stripes. Then the new login screen.

As everyone knows Windows rots with time and it was time to discard my copy now. The part I was worried about was loss of Ubuntu installation, since I installed it using Wubi inside windows. It was then I stumbled (literally) over a way to upgrade the virtual wubi installation to a true ext3 independent partition.

“The Loopmounted Virtual Partition Manager allows users to upgrade their existing Wubi or Lubi installation to a standard Ubuntu system by transferring all data, settings, and applications from the original install to a dedicated partition. The advantages of upgrading using LVPM are better disk performance and reliability, and the ability to replace the original operating system with Ubuntu.” I couldn’t resist trying.

step1: Installed the pre boot partion tool for linux.

step2: restarted, selected partion tool from the boot menu, and resized an NTFS partion by cutting out a 10Gb ext3 partition.

step3: restarted to wubi installation of Ubuntu, downloaded and installed LVPM

step4: Started LVPM and selected trnsfer>>SDA(number) of your ext3 partition.

step5: Watch the show, reboot

the tutorial is well explained here

You do it all right and get an error17 or error15 during the boot. I guess they forgot to mention the menu.lst changing part.

EDITING MENU.LST

to change it go to Wubi installation again. Now perform a test by downloading this script to desktop and copy paste this code to the terminal:

sudo bash ~/Desktop/boot_info_script*.sh

this will produce results.txt in the desktop, now suppose you installed in SDA9 then note down the bold code from results.txt like this:

/dev/sda9: UUID=”09b8370d-d20e-45c1-8951-dfb906bb0e4a” TYPE=”ext3″

now to open the menu.lst and grant permission to change do this

sudo mkdir /media/sda9
sudo mount /dev/sda9 /media/sda9
gksudo gedit /media/sda9/boot/grub/menu.lst

now Change
# groot=()/ubuntu/disks
to
# groot=the number you noted in the above step
change all three occurrences of
root ()/ubuntu/disks
to
uuid the number you noted in the above step
Save the file and reboot.  Hopefully you will now be able to boot into Ubuntu.

This post isn’t copied (people may doubt the pro look of the post), it was painstakingly compiled from different forums and ultimately I could boot into the independent Ubuntu. the various sources of information are linked in the post to give due respect to the place where knowledge originated from.

Purpose of  writing down this experiment was- for my personal future reference and to help ubuntu newbs (like me) to find information at one place regarding transfer of Wubi installation to a ext3 independent partition.

I recently upgraded from Windows XP to Ubuntu. Thanx to my friend Naman Bagga, who infact did all the setup work. I acknowledge his support to help me switch to Ubuntu.

Faced many problems with the ATI drivers. Though the Linux wizard managed to get it right after hours of patient work.

Naman Bagga’s blog