Assumptions

The only assumptions this article makes is that you 1) have a working Ubuntu One account and 2) you have a CD burner available. If you do not have a CD burner, you could always just copy that music to an external hard drive or make it available to others with the help of a DAAP server…but that’s another issue.

NOTE: I quickly discovered that, out of the box, Rhythmbox still doesn’t support MP3 playback. This is a bit of a shock since this is the file type that the Ubuntu One Music Store files are sold as. Fear not, you will be prompted to install the proper plugin.

Where did those files go?

One of the first issues you will come across is locating your music. You might assume the music to be in either ~/Music or ~/Downloads. It’s not. It’s carefully “hidden” in ~/.ubuntuone/Purchased from Ubuntu One. This gave me pause for two reasons: 1) That they tried to obfuscate the purchased music and 2) that they used spaces in a directory name (bad form there). As far as I have found, there is no way to change this directory.  You can, however, access those files from the Ubuntu One web interface and you can download the files to wherever you want.

Let’s burn

Now that you know the location of the files, the most obvious choice for burning them would be to use a standard burning software, like Brasero or K3B. You can do that if you like, especially if you just want to copy those MP3 files as “data” files. But if you want to burn an audio cd, why not just do it from within Rhythmbox? You can do that. Here’s how:

1. Select the songs you want to burn (use <Ctrl> to select multiple songs as per normal).
2. Right click and select Add to Playlist.
3. Select New Playlist.
4. Give the Playlist a name.
5. After the files have copied into the new playlist (this happens almost instantly), right-click the playlist and select Create Audio CD.
6. Let the magic happen.

This “magic” is thanks to communication between Rhythmbox and Brasero via a plugin.

Now you might be victim of a current bug that’s plaguing Rhythmbox. If nothing happens (you get no feedback whatsoever) you suffer from this bug. If so, run an update and see if this fixes the issue. This is a known issue and will hopefully be resolved soon. If you do not suffer from this issue, congratulations, you just burned your first audio CD in Rhythmbox.

Ubuntu One is a great feature…but how is it managed? You can have multiple machines attached to a single account (which means you can sync all your purchased music onto all of your Ubuntu One machines – sweet). The act of adding machines and managing your account is not that much of a challenge – you just have to know where to look. In this article I will show you how to manage your Ubuntu One account.

Installation

On the off chance you are running Ubuntu, and do not have Ubuntu One on your machine, fear not. As of 9.04 you can install Ubuntu One. All you have to do is follow these steps:

1. Open up Synaptic.
2. Search for “ubuntuone” (no quotes).
3. Mark the following for installation: ubuntuone-client, ubuntuone-client-XXX (Where XXX is either rhythmbox or banshee)
4. Let Syanptic pick up the dependencies.
5. Click Apply to install.

You will need to log out and log back in and then you will be ready to go.

Ubuntu One Preferences

Figure 1

From the MeMenu (this is only in 10.4) you can click on your name and then click on the Ubuntu One entry to open up the Ubuntu One preferences. If you are running 9.x you can click on System > Preferences > Ubuntu One to open up the preferences window (you can open it this same way in 10.4 as well).

When you open up the preferences window you will have a simple to use management tool (see Figure 1).  Within this window you will see three tabs, they are:

Account: This gives you basic information about your account as well as the means to upgrade and manage your account.

Devices: This tab shows which devices are attached to your Ubuntu One account and allows you to remove a device if you need. You can not add a device from this tab however. You can limit bandwidth on particular devices if you like.

Service: This tab allows you to enable/disable the various services. The services include Bookmarks (requires an add on for firefox), Broadcast Messages Archive, Contacts, File sync (including music download).

Add a machine

Figure 2

In order to add a machine, click on the Account tab and then click the Manage account link. This action will open a new tab in Firefox where you need to authenticate your account. Once authenticated you will see a new page (see Figure 2) that allows you to view the machines connected to your account. Click on that link and, if the machine you are using is not attached to your Ubuntu One account, you will see a text area to give the machine a name and an Add This Computer button. Do this and that machine will automatically be added and file-syncing will begin. It’s that simple.

From that same page you can upgrade your subscription to Ubuntu One. For the 50 Gig upgrade you pay $10.00 USD per month. Not too bad considering you are syncing music as well (2 gigs won’t store much music).

Final thoughts

Ubuntu One is well worth the little effort necessary to get it up and running. And although the Ubuntu One Music Store is ruffling some penguin feathers out there, it’s still a service long overdue.

Much like DropBox, with Ubuntu One you do have to sign up for a service. And, as I mentioned in the previous article, Ubuntu One has two levels:

• Free: The free account offers 2 Gigs of storage space.
• Paid: The paid account offers you 50 Gigs of storage space for $10.00 USD per month.

Once you have signed up with an account, you can then install the client, and finally enjoy all the syncing between Ubuntu computers you need. In this article you will see just how to install the client and begin using Ubuntu One.

Signing up

Before we get to the installation process, we must first visit the sign up process. It’s actually quite easy. Go to the Ubuntu One Plan page and select your plan. Once you have signed up for your plan, you then can proceed to the installation process.

Installation

After you have signed up you can then install the software. I will assume you are using Ubuntu 9.04 for this installation. The first thing you need to do is make sure your 9.04 is up to date. So run the Update Manager (found in the Administration sub-menu of the System menu). Once that is done you need to add the correct repositories to your /etc/apt/sources.list file. There is a very simple way to add these repositories to your sources file. If you click on this link allow GDebi to install the .deb file which will create a file in /etc/apt/sources.list.d called ubuntuone-beta-sources.list with the following contents:

# Ubuntu One Beta PPA sources
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntuone/beta/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntuone/beta/ubuntu jaunty main

Or you could add the above code to your /etc/apt/sources.list file.

I would suggest going with the automatic method, because it will also add the GPG key for you.

Once you have done that you can open up Synaptic (Not the Add/Remove Software tool) with the command sudo synaptic and follow these steps:

1. Search for “ubuntuone-client-gnome” (No quotes).
2. Accept all of the dependencies.
3. Click Apply to install.

Once installed you fill find the Ubuntu One entry in the Internet sub-menu of the Applications menu.

Using Ubuntu One

Figure 1

When you start Ubuntu One for the first time it will also start your browser to the Ubuntu One page. From this page you will need to create an account or sign in to your account. After you sign in you will then have to add the computer you are using to the account. You can add as many accounts as you need. After you add the computer the Ubuntu One icon residing in your GNOME panel will appear, show your files being updated (if there are any), and then the icon will disappear. If you want the icon to remain on the panel you just need to start the application again where you can then configure the icon to appear at all times (see Figure 1).

Here you can also configure Ubuntu One to start upon login as well as limit bandwidth usage.

If you find that the Ubuntu One icon does not show up after the initial sync, make sure you have it set up to connect automatically on start, log out, and then log back in. You should then see the Ubuntu One icon in your panel (see Figure 2).

Figure 2

The Ubuntu One icon you see in Figure 2 is the second from the left (between the Google Desktop icon and the DropBox icon).

You are ready to use Ubuntu One. You will find a new directory created in your ~/ directory called Ubuntu One. Any file you place in this folder will be sync’d with your Ubuntu One account. As soon as you add a file to this folder you will see it automatically start to sync with your Ubuntu One account.

Final thoughts

Ubuntu One certainly one-ups DropBox for simplicity. This tool will make using Ubuntu on the business level all the more easier. You will be able to easily sync all of your files between home and work. Give Ubuntu One a try.

But what can you expect and how should it run? In this preview of Ubuntu 9.10 I will fill you in on the upcoming features and give you a few screen shots as well as my opinion on how the release will fare.

Features

Of course, the first thing you want to know is the feature list. You will be surprised to see the number of features that have been added to 9.10. There are a few cases where some of the features are major changes to the distribution as a whole. Let’s take a look and see.

Upstart: Upstart replaces the /sbin/init daemon which handles the starting of services during the boot process.

Figure 1

Boot process: A brand new boot process has been worked in to make the boot of Ubuntu even faster than it was in 9.04. It is. The boot process for Linux is getting scary fast. Figure 1 shows the new Ubuntu boot screen. The goal of the 10 second start up is growing ever within reach.

Software Center: This is very new and replaces the old Add/Remove Software utility. The ultimate purpose of the Software Center is to replace Synaptic and Gdebi and will, eventually, also offer commercial software.  You can see how different the Software Center is to the

Figure 2

old tool in Figure 2. It is my belief the Software Center is Ubuntu’s attempt to catch on in the Enterprise space. And why shouldn’t they?

After taking a peek around the Software Center, I have to say I am really impressed.

GNOME: GNOME reaches the 2.28 release in the Ubuntu release cycle. The only major change is that GDM has been completely rewritten.

Kubuntu: With this release comes the very first Kubuntu Netbook release.

Enterprise Cloud Images: With the release of 9.10 you will images for use with Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud that is deployed with Amazon EC2.

Ubuntu One: This is Ubuntu’s version of Dropbox. With Ubuntu One you can keep all of files on your Ubuntu machines in sync with one another. You will have to sign up for an account in order to take advantage of this. You also have to subscribe to Ubuntu One. There are two types of accounts:

• Free: 2 Gigs of storage.
• Paid: 50 Gigs of storage for $10.00 USD per month.

Once you have subscribed you can then install the client software.

Hal deprecation: Our old buddy HAL is being stripped of many of its duties. Gone from HAL will be much of the suspend and hibernate subsystem as well as the handling of storage devices. In its place will be “DeviceKit-power”, “DeviceKit-disks” and “udev”.

New Intel video drivers: The Intel video drivers are moving away from EXA to UXA which will solve major performance issues seen in 9.04 for Intel graphics.

ext4: The ext4 filesystem will now be the default. I have used it on many installations and have found it to be reliable and fast.

Non-eXecutable Emulation: If you have a system that lacks NX hardware, this new system will provide an approximation of the NX hardware.

There have also been a number of security improvements such as:

• Blocking Module Loading: Blocks modules from loading after boot.
• Position Independent Executables: Helps to prevent from unknown threats.
• AppArmor Improvements: Associate more profiles to executable applications.

The results

After using 9.10 for a day I have to say I am impressed. I have been using 9.04 on nearly all of my machines and was wondering how Ubuntu could be improved upon. Well, it seems the developement team has, in fact, improved upon 9.04. It’s not a giant leap forward, but the speed improvements and the new software promises to make the Ubuntu experience one that anyone can enjoy. If you are interested in downloading the pre-release of Ubuntu, you can find it on the Karmic Koala download page.