[HOWTO] Install elementaryOS Freya on a Dell XPS 13 (2015)

Finally I'm back where I belong: elementaryOS! And boy does it look good on my new XPS 13. Though some steps in the installation process aren't as straightforward as I would've wanted them to be, thanks to the help of the great people in the elementaryOS community, I managed to get everything working. Here's a small guide!

1. download elementaryOS and put it on a usb stick. There are some pretty good guides online for that, so I'm not gonna cover that in my tutorial. (Here's a guide from elementaryOS)

2. insert the usb stick in the xps 13, reboot, and hit F12 when the Dell boot logo appears. You will now enter the boot menu. From there, choose to use the legacy boot option from usb stick.

3. the elementaryOS boot menu now appears. Before continuing, you'll have to change a setting in the boot options. Otherwise the intel graphics card won't work as it should (you will have a very cluttered screen). Hit F6 and after that the ESC button. You should now see a boot option line at the bottom of your screen. at the end of it after 'quiet splash', enter 'nomodeset', just as you can see on the image here:

Hit enter to boot up the usb stick.


4. The installation process itself is pretty easy, so I'm not gonna cover that here. Here's a guide from Ubuntu that is pretty much the same as in elementary. Use the comments if you need any help :)

5. after installing, reboot your laptop, and pull the usb stick out. Hit F12 again at the dell boot logo and choose to enter BIOS Setup. You'll have to make the legacy boot from SSD the default boot option, otherwise your laptop won't find an operating system. Save, exit and reboot if you did that. elementaryOS should now boot up in about 2 seconds.

6. as we still are booting up our system with the nomodeset option, we will first install the correct drivers. Fire up a terminal and install:

sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-core

This will install the appropriate drivers for your video card.

After doing that, we will take away the nomodeset option at boot:

sudo scratch-text-editor /etc/default/grub

Find the line from your elementary os boot, and take away the 'nomodeset'.

Close Scratch, and update your bootloader:

sudo update-grub

Reboot your pc, everything should be working now! Enjoy one of the best operating systems on one of the most beautiful pieces of hardware :)

Questions? Comments? Got a better way to fix the graphics issues? Let me know in the comments!

[HOWTO] Set up your owncloud home server with Ubuntu server 14.04 LTS (in Belgium with Telenet ISP)

So this is an issue I have been struggling with for a very long time, so I thought sharing it with the world would be my ultimate reward :) I always wanted to have my very own home server that pretty much works like Dropbox, but has an unlimited amount of space AND is accessible from outside my home network. And boy does it work like a charm :)

This guide will attempt to learn you the following things:

• Install Ubuntu Server Edition 14.04 LTS on an old PC
• Install a GUI (desktop environment) on the Ubuntu Server for easy access
• Install an Owncloud Cloud Sharing Server on your Ubuntu Server
• Make your Owncloud accessible from outside your home network (with instructions for people who live in Belgium and have Telenet as their ISP)

Let's get to it! 

CHAPTER 1: install Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS on your PC

First things first: let's start by installing a fresh Ubuntu Server on your old PC.

1. Go to ubuntu.com, and download the ISO file of the server edition to your liking. I used 14.04 LTS for the 5 year long support and updates. Just go to this link: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/server
2. Burn the ISO on a disk or USB stick (you might wanna check the BIOS of the PC that will carry the server if you can boot from USB before burning the ISO to a stick). I won't go into detail on this as there are plenty of guides online on how to burn an ISO image :)
3. Boot your old PC from the disk or USB stick you just burned. The installation program of the Ubuntu Server will start up. Don't forget to change the language and keyboard layout before hitting the install button on the first boot screen :) Make sure your PC is connected to the internet!
4. Go through all steps of installing Ubuntu Server on your PC. There's nothing really hard about that as for the owncloud server, you don't really have to change any of the default settings already filled in at installation. The only thing you might wanna get some attention to is the partitioning of your hard drives. I always prefer to select 'manual configuration' as it's not hard to fill in and you have total control of how you want your hard drives to look like. Step 5 will go into detail for partitioning.
5. PARTITIONING:
   My set up is as follows: I have one HDD where I wanted to install the operating system on, and one HDD of 3TB for all my files that I wanna access through Owncloud. I had to create the following partitions: 
1. Create a SWAP partition instead of an EXT4 partition of at least 2GB
2. Create an EXT4 partition with mount point '/' for your HDD that will carry the operating system
3. Create an EXT4 partition with mount point '/hdd2' for your HDD that will carry the files for Owncloud. You can change the hdd2 in whatever you like.
6. When asked which packages you want installed on your Ubuntu Server (eg. LAMP, Windows Samba, FTP...), don't check any of that packages. You won't be needing them anyway.
7. That's it, you should be having an Ubuntu Server installation up and running on your PC. When you reboot, you should be able to login and see a command line. Next step is installing a desktop environment on your server for easier access :)

CHAPTER 2: install a desktop environment on Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS

Now many people will say that you shouldn't do this to keep your server more secure, but as this is a simple home server, I prefer to have a mouse pointer and desktop interface available for easier access. Didn't regret installing this :) We will install a stripped down version of Lubuntu on this server with the least possible amount of packages necessairy to get it up and running. 

1. Login to your ubuntu server and wait for the command line
2. When you see the command line. Fill in the following commands:
   
   sudo apt-get install lxde-common --no-install-recommends
   sudo apt-get install lubuntu-core --no-install-recommends
   
   This will install the essential Lubuntu desktop environment for you.
3. To get Lubuntu up and running on your next reboot, you'll have to create a session file. Fill in the following command to create that file:
   
   sudo touch ~/.xsession
   
   Edit the file using the following command:
   
   sudo nano ~/.xsession
   
   Fill in the following (and only) line in that file:
   
   lxsession -s Lubuntu -e LXDE
   
   Save it, and reboot using 'sudo reboot'. You should be getting the Lubuntu login screen on your next startup :)
4. When you logged in into your lubuntu environment, you can install some additional packages to make your workflow easier (this is optional): 
1. install a webbrowser to access the owncloud web interface (midori is the most lightweight webbrowser around to do the job):
   
   sudo apt-get install midori
2. install GDebi package installer to easily install Teamviewer in the next step (if you like)
   
   sudo apt-get install gdebi
3. install Teamviewer to easily access your server from another computer. Go to teamviewer.com to download the latest version. Open up GDebi and open the downloaded package with it to install it.
4. install a text editor to easily modify configuration files without having to use nano in the terminal:
   
   sudo apt-get install leafpad

That's it, you should have Lubuntu up and running on your server :)

CHAPTER 3: Install Owncloud on your Ubuntu Server 

1. You can easily install Owncloud through the OpenSuse repositories. To add them, just go to this page for further instructions (don't forget to add the key for the repo as well, instructions are also on that page). After adding the repo's, just fire up a terminal and install owncloud using:
   
   sudo apt-get install owncloud
2. (optional) After installing Owncloud, you should give the owncloud user permitions to your second HDD where you wanna store your files (if you have one, if you have just one HDD, skip this step):
1. First, make a directory in your second HDD where you want Owncloud to store your files:
   
   sudo mkdir /path/to/your/second/HDD/owncloud
   
   So for me that was: sudo mkdir /hdd2/owncloud
2. Now give permitions to the Owncloud user to use that directory:
   
   sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /path/to/your/second/HDD/owncloud
   
   So for me that was: sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /hdd2/owncloud
3. Now you can fire up a webbrowser and see your Owncloud server in action :) Type in http://localhost/owncloud and hit enter. You should see this first run screen where you can choose your admin user and fill in the path to your owncloud folder (hit the 'advanced' button to see everything):
   
   
4. Click finish setup. When you get an error message saying that your owncloud installation can't access its database, you should have a look at step 2 where I explained how to give owncloud permition to the owncloud folder you've chosen. Be sure it has full writing permitions!
5. To access your owncloud installation from another computer in your network, just type in the following in a webbrowser:
   
   http://IPAdressOfYourServer/owncloud
   
   To know the ip-address, simply open a terminal on your server and type 'ifconfig'. This should return your ip-address something like 192.168.x.x.
6. Hooray, you got owncloud up and running! Now go to owncloud.org to download the desktop clients so you can start syncing :) When they ask for your owncloud-server, simply fill in the address of step 5. If you want to access your Owncloud installation from outside your home network, you're not quite done yet :) 

CHAPTER 4: access your Owncloud installation from another network (with instructions for ISP Telenet in Belgium)

Here come's the tricky part. Many ISP's (such as my own Telenet) won't allow you to access any server installed in your home through your IP-address and the default port 80 (through which all websites are installed by default), so you will have to change the port on your webserver installation. Luckily, this is not so hard as Owncloud is installed on an Apache webserver which is very easy to configure. 

We will change the default port to access our owncloud installation from 80 to 8080. 

1. fire up a terminal and type:
   sudo leafpad /etc/apache2/ports.conf
2. in that file, change 'listen 80' to 'listen 8080'
3. save the file, exit leafpad, and restart your apache web server using:
   
   sudo service apache2 restart
4. To test whether this worked, open up a webbrowser and try accessing your owncloud installation with its new ports:
   
   http://localhost:8080/owncloud
   
   If the owncloud login screen shows up, that means it worked!

Now we will go into our home router settings to point all incoming traffic on port 8080 to our server. I will include screenshots of my own router settings at telenet, they may look different in your case. The basic idea is to point incoming port 8080 to the internal ip address of your server (the one we used in chapter 3, step 5 which looks like 192.168.x.x). This is how I filled in my settings at 'mijn telenet', the router admin suite at Telenet. For people also trying to fix this on Telenet: go to 'mijn telenet' > internet > draadloze instellingen > geavanceerd > ipv4 firewall & port forwarding to get this screen:

Save your settings, and test whether you can access your owncloud server from your external IP-address (you can find it at whatismyipaddress.com): 

http://YourExternalIPAddress:8080/owncloud

Did it work? Great! Enjoy your owncloud server! Most ISP's though have a dynamic IP assigned to you, which means that your IP address may change over time. To not having to remember the IP address all the time, you can use a dynamic DNS website to remember it for you. That way, your IP-address will have a simple domain name like MyWebsite.ddns.net, and it will always point to your IP-address, even if it has changed. 

A website which offers dynamic DNS is No-IP. Head over to their website, create an account, and fill in your ip-address details as shown in the screenshot below: 

Now you can access your owncloud server through the domainname you just gave to your IP address :) The only thing left to do is install the No-Ip update client on your server so the domain name always points to the right IP-address. Instructions can be found on this page. You will need the build-essentials package to install this client. You can install it by running: 

sudo apt-get install build-essentials

Wow, I just wrote 2 hours on this howto :p Hope someone will find it useful! As usual, if you have any comments or questions, put them in the comments! I will try to answer them as much as possible (though I'm also pretty new to this stuff :) )

Have a nice day!

PS: Credits go to all the nice people I gathered information from on the internet, thank you so much!

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2222849&page=2

http://matveen.blogspot.be/2013/04/set-up-owncloud-server-at-home.html

http://doc.owncloud.org/server/7.0/admin_manual/installation/installation_linux.html

[HOWTO] How to get the minimize hotcorner back in Ubuntu Gnome 13.10/14.04?

So for some reason Gnome deleted the hotcorner by which you could just move your cursor to the bottom left corner of your screen to minimize a window. I missed that feature so much in the new Gnome, so here's how I added it again:

1. Go to the Gnome Extension website to activate a plugin called 'Hi, Jack'. This extension turns the bottom two corners of the screen into hot corners.

2. Fire up a terminal and install xwit (which let you minimize windows using a command) using this command:

sudo apt-get install xwit

3. Download this script which uses xwit to minimize your active window. Make it executable by right clicking the downloaded script -> properties -> rights -> 'allow executing file'  (might be slightly different as I don't have an English version of Gnome)

4. Open up Gnome Tweak Tool, go to the extension tab en press the settings button from the hi, jack extension:

5. Point hi,jack to the script you just downloaded and you're done! :) Enjoy minimizing windows again using hotcorners!

[HOWTO] How to install Gloobus Preview on Ubuntu 13.10/14.04?

Gloobus Preview is a Gnome application based on Apple’s “Quicklook”, designed to enable a full screen preview of any kind of file.

Don't like the default preview software that comes with GNOME just like me? Want to install Gloobus Preview but you're getting an error saying that you don't have the right dependencies installed like this? 

Here's how I installed Gloobus Preview on Ubuntu Gnome 13.10 (this is only tested on a 64-bit system) :

1. First uninstall the meta-package named ubuntu-gnome-desktop as this would later give conflicts with some dependencies. Don't worry, by uninstalling this package nothing of your programs will go away, that's why it's called a meta-package ;) So uninstall using this command: 

sudo apt-get remove ubuntu-gnome-desktop

If you're on an other version of ubuntu (like ubuntu itself) you can have to use other package names. Eg. for ubuntu it's ubuntu-desktop

2. I made a modified version of the .deb package where the dependencies won't give you any troubles. Download both .deb packages: 

http://www4.zippyshare.com/v/9896107/file.html

http://www4.zippyshare.com/v/60058331/file.html

3. Use a package installer (like the Ubuntu Software Center or Gdebi) to install both packages. First install the gloobus-modified package, afterwards the gloobus-sushi package. 

4. Fire up a terminal and type the following command (this is to link a newer version of libgtksourceview, a dependency of gloobus, to an older one so gloobus can work properly): 

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgtksourceview-3.0.so.1.1.0 /usr/lib/libgtksourceview-3.0.so.0

5. Restart nautilus by typing this in a terminal:

nautilus -q 

6. That's it! You should now be able to use gloobus-preview. Go ahead an try the spacebar on a file in nautilus!

Questions? Comments? Ask away!


P.S.: I've put together my modified version of gloobus using this tutorial.

[Quick Tip] How to fix bluetooth headset/speaker in Ubuntu 13.10?

So I've recentely switched to Ubuntu Gnome 13.10 to give the new Gnome Shell a try, so I won't be posting about elementaryOS for while now. Let me start by saying that I really love the new Gnome Shell, can't wait untill the new headerbars arrive in elementary!

So a problem that I encountered was that I was unable to connect to my bluetooth speaker. When I clicked connect on the bluetooth settings, it connected for a second or two, and then immediately disconnected again. I tried a lot of things to fix this issue, but I think these two did the trick for me:

First of all, try to load the Pulseaudio (your sound server) Bluetooth module manually, and see if that fixes the issue. You can do that by typing this in a terminal:

sudo pactl load-module module-bluetooth-discover

Try to connnect again to your bluetooth device. If that didn't help, go on and type the following in the terminal:

sudo gedit /etc/bluetooth/audio.conf

This will open your audio configuration file for bluetooth. Here, search for the following line:

#AutoConnect=true

And change that to:

 AutoConnect=false

Don't forget to remove the hashtag as well! Save the file, and reboot your pc.

That should be it! Hopefully this fixed your bluetooth as it did with me :)

Questions? Put them in the comments!

How to fix elementaryOS after installing an nvidia driver update

Also using Bumblebee to handle your display server? Tried to install a new nvidia update, but it bricked your system and you can't login anymore, just like me? Here's how I fixed it!

So I've ran into this problem quite a few times now, and I keep struggling to fix the damages I made, so I decided to make a guide about it :) 

Here's the problem: you try to install an update for your nvidia GPU, but when you try to reboot your system, your login screen doesn't show up anymore and your pc seems to be stuck. 

The solution that worked for me: 

1. when your screen is stuck and no login screen is appearing, press ctrl+alt+F1 to get to a command terminal

2. it may be possible that your nvidia installer created a xorg.conf file, which isn't necessairy when using bumblebee. To delete it, use the following command: 

sudo rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf

3. install ppa-purge: 

sudo apt-get install ppa-purge

4. now purge all ppa's having something to do with bumblebee and nvidia. For me, that was: 

ppa-purge ppa:bumblebee/stableppa-purge ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates

this will uninstall your broken bumblebee installation and possible updates from nvidia


5. check if no other nvidia drivers are installed on your system using following command:

sudo dpkg --get-selections | grep nvidia

if you have any other nvidia drivers installed, you will see them appear in the list. Use the following command to install all these packages listed (except for nvidia-common, that one can stay):

sudo apt-get purge NAME_OF_THE_PACKAGE

6. now use 'sudo reboot' to reboot your pc, you should be able to access the login screen now!


7. to reinstall bumblebee and an nvidia driver, use the guide I wrote a couple of months ago, it still works!

And that is what did the trick for me. If you have any more issues, feel free to leave a comment.

Tweak your startup with this nice elementary-styled bootloader theme

Fed up with your boring text-only bootloader? Here's an elementary-styled alternative you'll certainly like a lot! 

The bootloader of your computer is the screen you get when you start up your device, letting you choose which operating system you want to start up (that is if you have more than one operating system installed, for example elementaryOS and Windows).

Meet BURG, a graphical interface for elementary's default bootloader GRUB:

How to install this?

Install BURG

First, we have to install BURG. To do this, fire up a terminal and type in the following commands:

• Add the PPA to install BURG:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:n-muench/burg
sudo apt-get update 

• Install BURG (if you installed your GRUB bootloader somewhere else than the default settings in your elementaryOS installation, you'll have to change the hd0 to the right partition. To list up all disks and partitions on your computer, type in 'lsblk' in a terminal):

sudo apt-get install burg burg-themes
sudo burg-install "(hd0)"

Congrats, you now have BURG installed on your computer! Go check it out by rebooting your pc! If you want the awesome elementary-ish theme, read further!

Install the theme

• First download this zip-file: 

http://www32.zippyshare.com/v/7331949/file.html

(if the link is down, please let me know in the comments)

• Then, right click the Files-icon in your dock and choose 'run as administrator'. 

• Go to your downloads folder and extract the downloaded zip. 

• Copy the extracted folder to /boot/burg/themes

• Now open up a terminal and update BURG:

 sudo update-burg

That's it! You now have the theme installed. Just reboot your pc and choose the theme by pressing 't' when your bootloader shows up. Then, select 'el_castillo' from the list and press enter. If you want to change the resolution of the theme as well, you can press F3 on the bootloader screen.

All credit goes to bigRZA for his magnificent theme! I just modified the elementary logo so it would fit the new one :)