One of the annoying little setup items on my list of things to do every time I reinstall Kubuntu is changing the bootsplash screen resolution from 800×600 to something more appropriate for my monitor, specifically, 1280×1024. Here’s how it’s done:

sudo nano /etc/usplash.conf

The file should be altered to read:

# Usplash configuration file
# These parameters will only apply after running update-initramfs.

xres=1280
yres=1024

The final step is to update initramfs, the initial RAM disk used by the kernel when Linux first boots up:

sudo update-initramfs -u

If you skip the last step, you will probably only see your new usplash resolution during shutdown and not when your computer boots up.

That’s it!

My first computer was an Apple IIc. I was thirteen years old and, at that age, it was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen. It had a gorgeous, green-on-black display screen, 128KB of RAM, no hard disk, and a Slim-line internal 5.25″ floppy drive into which you loaded whatever version of Zork you were in the mood for, and fired it up. All software was written in Applesoft BASIC, and although there was no official term for it at the time, everything was open source.

A simple Ctrl-C (or some such keystroke) was all that was required to break the flow of whatever program you were running and take a peek under the hood. I wrote my first computer program on the IIc. There might have been limits to what that little machine could do, but there were no restrictions. If you could imagine it, you could build it, and if you didn’t know quite how to build it, you just found someone else’s program that did something close, and figured out how they had done it. The Apple IIc was more than a tool, it was a teacher.

In college I used PCs and Macs, none of which I owned, of course — it just wasn’t expected in those days — and I reluctantly deciphered the library’s Unix terminals for the sole purpose of emailing friends with Pine. Until my junior year, by which time I was accustomed to using the university’s computer labs for my paper-writing and other needs, I kept that old Apple IIc around, with a dot-matrix printer, just in case.

It wasn’t until after graduation that I could finally afford (almost) to purchase my own computer. After buying and returning a couple of defective laptop PCs from a big box electronics retailer, I finally decided to go back to Apple, and I sprung for a Powerbook G3. It was beautiful, and it was definitely a Mac, but something was missing.

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Here’s how to get rid of that annoying “Busy Cursor” bouncing icon next to the mouse pointer in Kubuntu.

(1) Press Alt+F2 to bring up the Run Command dialog box.

(2) Type kcontrol and click Run.

(3) Select “Appearance & Themes” from the left sidebar menu.

(4) Select “Launch Feedback” from the sub-menu.

(5) In the “Busy Cursor” box, select “No Busy Cursor” from the drop down menu.

That’s it! Banished for good!

After a fresh install of Kubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon,” there are a few extra tasks necessary to get everything set up and running smoothly, especially when it comes to multimedia support and internet tools. This short tutorial will allow you to quickly enable some of the features missing in a vanilla installation.

The goal of this process is speed of setup, so I’ll use terminal commands rather than the more-familiar graphical menu, however I will make an effort to keep things simple and straightforward. Comments are welcome. (You might want to read all the way to the end before jumping into the commands.)

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Login to MySQL:

~$ mysql -u username -p

Create a database:

create database db_name;

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Pretty URLs are URLs that have meaning for human readers, rather than just being seemingly random jibberish only a web server could appreciate. The following is an example of a “pretty” URL:

http://my.blog.com/archive/2007/10/pretty-urls

Note that every part of the URL is relevant for a human reader. For comparison, here’s an example of an “ugly” URL:

http://www.mysite.com/nuke/modules.php?name=Forums&file=posting&mode=quote&p=14488&sid=0293840293840577

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If you want to build dynamic websites, one of the first things you’ll need to do is set up a development environment your local computer, so you can experiment and test new code without uploading everything to a remote web server. In a nutshell, this means LAMP — Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP.

With this setup, you’ll be primed and ready to go to run popular content management software on your local box–like Drupal, Joomla or Silverstripe; start a Wordpress or Textpattern blog; or even roll your own community site from scratch using a hot framework like CakePHP.

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