The Arduino Playground does a pretty good job of directing users on how to install Arduino on Debian based distributions but there were a couple of spots where I found it was lacking, and had to go out to do my own research. The main thing it lacked was instructions on how to set up a launcher for your desktop or Gnome menu. I will outline those at the end of this guide, but first I will give you a quick overview of the installation process from the start as I performed it on both my Linux Mint laptop and my Ubuntu 9.10 desktop. Although this guide was written with Linux Mint users in mind, there is absolutely no reason this will not work on other Debian based distros.

Open up your console and run the following commands to install some necessary prerequisites. If you know for a fact you have them installed you can skip installing them again. You will most likely be prompted to enter Y before the installation will begin.

sudo apt-get install sun-java5-jre
sudo apt-get install gcc-avr
sudo apt-get install avr-libc

Now that you have the prerequisites installed you will need to download the newest version of Arduino. You can save it to your desktop for now. After it has finished downloading open up the folder and extract it to your desired location (such as your home directory) or you can do it in your console as well:

tar xvzf ~/Desktop/arduino-0017.tgz ~/Arduino

At this point it is safe to delete the tarball on your desktop.

At this point Arduino is installed and ready to use. This is also where the Arduino Playground leaves you hanging, no one wants to open up their console every time to launch a program or browse to it with their file explorer. I initially tried creating an installer just as I normally would, by pointing it to ~/Arduino/arduino) only to find that the program did not launch when I clicked it. So I then created a bash script which called the same file and made sure it was executable. Still nothing! So that’s when I realized that I had to do things a bit differently. Nothing too fancy, just a slightly different way of approaching it.

First create an empty bash file and make it executable.

touch ~/Arduino/runArduino.sh
chmod a+x ~/Arduino/runArduino.sh

Then open it in your favourite text editor (e.g. emacs or pico), and add the following contents to your bash script:

#!/bin/bash
cd ~/Applications/Arduino && ./arduino

Save the file and close your terminal. Right click the Gnome menu and select Add to Panel. Select Custom Application Launcher and hit Add. Enter Arduino for the name, and in the path put /home/username/Arduino/runArduino.sh. You can also select an icon for the launcher, which is another place Linux users were left out in the cold as the tarball does not contain an SVG file. Fortunately, I did manage to dig up a PNG version to use. Save this icon to your install directory and select it by clicking the “spring” icon and navigating to your install directory. From there click close to save the settings and add the launcher to your panel.

sudo apt-get install lsb-release scrot
wget http://github.com/downloads/djmelik/archey/archey-0.2.8.deb
sudo dpkg -i archey-0.2.8.deb

If you’re running Crunchbang, which at the time of writing this article is using Ubuntu 9.04 as it’s base, you’ll need to get a more up-to-date version of coreutils or else Archey will give you the following error:

user@crunchbang:/usr/bin$ archey
df: unrecognised option '--total'
Try `df --help' for more information.
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/archey", line 304, in <module>
    func()
  File "/usr/bin/archey", line 285, in disk_display
    total = p1.splitlines()[-1]
IndexError: list index out of range

Naturally, I’d assume that anyone running a version of Ubuntu that’s 9.04 or older will encounter the same issue. I did not run into it on my Linux Mint 8 box or my Ubuntu 10.10 box. By typing df –version you’ll see that it only has 6.10 included. You’ll want at least version 7 or else your df command will not support the –total flag. So go ahead and download the package and install it:

wget http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/c/coreutils/coreutils_8.5-1_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i coreutils_8.5-1_i386.deb

Now when you run Archey it should run as expected, without any errors. Your next step is then to add it to your .bashrc so that it executes each time you open a terminal. Open it up with your favourite text editor and add archey to the end of it an dhten save it. Now every time you open a terminal or SSH into your box you should be presented with something like this:

                          .oyhhs:   User: fettesps
                 ..--.., shhhhhh-   Hostname: fettesps-crunchbang
               -+++++++++`:yyhhyo`  OS: Ubuntu 9.04 i686
          .--  -++++++++/-.-::-`    Kernel: 2.6.28-13-generic
        .::::-   :-----:/+++/++/.   Uptime: 2 days, 4:44
       -:::::-.          .:++++++:  Window Manager: Openbox
  ,,, .:::::-`             .++++++- Shell: Bash
./+++/-`-::-                ./////: Terminal: Xterm
+++++++ .::-                        Packages: 1036
./+++/-`-::-                :yyyyyo CPU: Pentium(R) Dual-Core CPU E6300 @ 2.80GHz
  ``` `-::::-`             :yhhhhh: RAM: 266 MB / 497 MB
       -:::::-.         `-ohhhhhh+  Disk: 2.2G / 49G
        .::::-` -o+///+oyhhyyyhy:
         `.--  /yhhhhhhhy+,....
               /hhhhhhhhh-.-:::;
               `.:://::- -:::::;
                         `.-:-'

Enjoy!

Continuation of from the last post

Installing Alpine 2.0 in Ubuntu Linux is a fairly simple process but can be rather confusing and elusive as there is no GUI to help you out. I ran into a few hitches along the way so I thought I’d help out future command line enthusiasts who might run into the same issue.

Installing Alpine is as simple as:

sudo apt-get install alpine

A few seconds later you’ll have Alpine up and running. Type “alpine” into your terminal and then follow the prompts. To configure it to use Gmail you’ll go into the Setup menu by pressing “S” and from there you’ll go into Config by hitting “C”.

This is how I configured mine for Gmail:

Personal Name                     = <No Value Set: using "Your Friendly Name">
User Domain                       = gmail.com
SMTP Server (for sending)         = smtp.googlemail.com:587/tls/user=username@gmail.com
NNTP Server (for news)            = <No Value Set>
Inbox Path                        = {imap.gmail.com:993/user=username@gmail.com/ssl/novalidate-cert}Inbox
Incoming Archive Folders          = <No Value Set>
Pruned Folders                    = <No Value Set>
Default Fcc (File carbon copy)    = <No Value Set: using "sent-mail">
Default Saved Message Folder      = <No Value Set: using "saved-messages">
Postponed Folder                  = <No Value Set: using "postponed-msgs">
Read Message Folder               = <No Value Set>
Form Letter Folder                = <No Value Set>
Trash Folder                      = <No Value Set: using "Trash">
Literal Signature                 = <No Value Set>
Signature File                    = <No Value Set: using ".signature"> 

One thing worth noting there is the Inbox Path I set. Every other guide I read said to use
{pop.gmail.com:993/pop3/ssl/novalidate-cert/user=user@gmail.com}
which simply did not work for me. I struggled with this one for a good 20 min or so until I found this post which did it slightly different than most. Not sure why, but my computer needed that a bit different and if anything I’d guess it’s because I’m using the x64 build.

While you’re in the config menu you’ll also want to fix a few other things which were suggested on the Ubuntu Forums.

[Advanced User Preferences]
[x] "Save Will Not Delete"

[Pruning Rule]
[x] "Don’t rename, don’t delete" 

At this point you want to save your settings and exit Alpine. So hit E and then YQ to exit and once again Y to confirm.

Now before you start Alpine again I suggest setting it to save your password. Doing this is a bit convoluted but basically what you’re going to do is create an empty file in your home directory which will store your encrypted password.

cd ~
touch .pine-passfile
alpine

When Alpine starts back up enter your Gmail password and it will then ask if you want to save it locally, hit Y. You will have to do this once more the next time you send an outgoing mail but after that you will not be prompted again for your Gmail password.

Now Alpine is all installed and you can be elite and say you read your email in the command line. You can of course take it one step further and add it to your screen profile and then attach it every time you SSH in. I’ve always got screen windows running for things like IRSSI and Hellanzb and Emacs, and now Alpine.

WARNING: The following packages cannot be authenticated!
  foo bar baz
Install these packages without verification [y/N]?

I hit y but the install still failed. I did a quick Google and found this solution to the problem.

sudo apt-get install debian-archive-keyring
sudo apt-get update

After running those commands I got the same error, and once again I said yes. This time it installed successfully. So I went back and ran the sudo apt-get install alpine command again, and was prompted with the same question. Thinking it didn’t work I hit yes and to my chigrin it installed perfectly this time. Now, to figure out how to use Alpine to read my Gmail…

I am one of those people who loves a clean desktop, I hate it when files and up scattered upon it and do not like how some icons are “glued” to the desktop by default in every operating system. So when I went to remove these icons from my desktop I found that I couldn’t just delete them as I had expected. I even tried doing it through the terminal, expecting to find symlinks in the ~/Desktop/ directory but it was empty. At that point I figured I’d have to bust out the gconf-editor, having done so in the past to remove the mounted drives from the desktop. It turns out there is a more simple solution in Linux Mint.

After digging around I found the Desktop Configuration Tool. If you are using the MintMenu then you can find it under

• MintMenu
• Preferences
• Desktop Configuration Tool

Once it is loaded you will see that it is a very simple utility, on your first tab all you have to do is uncheck Computer, Home, and Mounted Volumes. From there just click Apply and close the window, and you’re done!

The first thing that had to go was the annoying “fortune” message that would display every time you launched a terminal. I have no idea why such a thing would be included in Mint as I can’t see very many people wanting it. Thankfully, removing it is quite simple.

If you just want to disable it, run the following command:

sudo pico /etc/bash.bashrc

And scroll all the way to the bottom, you’ll want to disable or completely remove the line that says:

/usr/bin/mint-fortune

If, like me, you’re running Mint on a Netbook and need to free up as much resource as possible, you can completely remove it from your system by running the following command:

sudo apt-get remove fortune

Just be sure to complete the above step as well or you will get the error bash: /usr/bin/mint-fortune: No such file or directory every time you open your terminal.

$ dpkg --get-selections
acl							install
acpi-support				install
acpid						install
adduser						install
alacarte					install
alsa-base					install
alsa-utils					install
anacron						install
apmd						install
apparmor					install
apparmor-utils				install
apport						install
apport-gtk					install
apt							install
apt-transport-https			install
apt-utils					install
apt-xapian-index			install
aptitude					install
apturl						install

You’ll find that there is far too much information returned by this command and the only way to find exactly what you need is to grep it with a specific query. So for example if you were looking to find out what Python packages you had installed on that system you could use this command:

$ dpkg --get-selections | grep python
libpython2.6					install
python							install
python-apport					install
python-apt						install
python-brlapi					install
python-cairo					install
python-central					install
python-cups						install
python-cupshelpers				install

If you read the man pages on dpkg you’ll find there are many other useful commands you utilize. If you’re trying to track down the location of a package you can use the following command:

$ dpkg -L firefox
/.
/usr
/usr/share
/usr/share/doc
/usr/share/doc/firefox
/usr/share/doc/firefox/copyright
/usr/share/doc/firefox/changelog.Debian.gz

This will give you a good idea of where you need to look if you’re trying to find some config files.

sudo useradd -d /home/username -m username
sudo passwd username

I had thought for a long time this was sufficient. It created their home directory with the -m parameter and specified that location with the -d parameter. After that I set the password and the user was now able to login to the system with basic privileges. But after a while I began to notice some quirks with those users. They didn’t act like the initial admin user that was created by the installation process.  I found that the prompt was a bit less informative.  It also lacked a history, and the ability to hit tab to complete a directory as you typed it.  I even found myself copying over the root .bashrc and trying to figure out what ws different between the users.  Then I typed in the following command just to make sure it was using bash:

echo $SHELL

I looked at the response.

/bin/sh

*face-palm*

No wonder .bashrc didn’t do anything, I was using a completely different shell for my subsequent users.  I had never taken the time to learn the difference between the various shells, most systems use bash by default so that is what I learned and got used to.  So I never even realized they were using sh instead of bash.

To quickly change the shell for an established user to bash just run the command:

chsh -s /bin/bash username

Since then I’ve adjusted my create user command to include bash as my default shell.

sudo useradd -d /home/username -m username -s /bin/bash

There are many more parameters that you can add on to this command. If you’d like to read up on those then just type man useradd and read through the documentation.  Or if you want a very verbose and easy to use command to create your users you can always try adduser.  Instead of passing in which parameters you want to specify it will prompt you on every possibility.  Great for if you don’t know which options exist, but also somewhat overwhelming in the beginning.

mradmin@microsoft$ sudo adduser username
Password: ******
Adding user `username’…
Adding new group `username’ (1337).
Adding new user `username’ (1337) with group `username’.
Creating home directory `/home/username’.
Copying files from `/etc/skel’
Enter new UNIX password:
Retype new UNIX password:
passwd: password updated successfully
Changing the user information for username
Enter the new value, or press ENTER for the default
Full Name []: Example User
Room Number []: 0
Work Phone []: 604-6122
Home Phone []: 604-6222
Other []:
Is the information correct? [y/N] 

The choice of which two methods to use is a mater of preference. In the long run, what matters is that you educate yourself on what all of the available options do. And remember, man useradd and man adduser are your friends!

Hit Alt+F2 and run gconf-editor
Go to Apps -> Nautilus -> Desktop
Remove the check mark from volumes_visible

You’ll notice that the Configuration Editor (gconf-editor) is similar to Window’s Registry Editor.  With that being said, use the same amount of caution you’d use when editing your Window’s Registry.