Dual Boot Windows 8 And Ubuntu

In the past, we covered how to dual boot Windows 7 and Windows 8, and Windows XP and Windows 8 operating systems. Dual booting a newer version of Windows OS with earlier version of Windows has always been a simple task.

At times, a user may need to install the popular Ubuntu OS in dual with Windows 8 for some reasons. Though dual booting Windows 8 and Ubuntu (Windows 8 installed first) is pretty easy, the only catch is that the installer doesn’t recognize Windows 8 partition. In other words, you can’t use the straight-forward install Ubuntu alongside with Windows option during setup. So, how to dual boot Windows 8 and Ubuntu?

If you are looking for a simple way to install Windows 8 in dual boot with Ubuntu (Windows 8 installed first), follow the step-by-step instructions given below.

NOTE: We assume that you have already installed Windows 8 on the computer.

Procedure:

Step 1: Turn on the PC and boot into Windows 8. Create a new partition for Ubuntu installation. You can create a new partition by following our how to create a new partition and how to shrink or extend a partition guides. You can also take the help of Partition Wizard (free) software for advanced task.

Step 2: The next step is to download Ubuntu from this official page. Both 32-bit and 64-bit versions are available. If you are unsure which one to download, simply download 32-bit Ubuntu.

Step 3: To start the installation you need to have the installation media. That is, you need to either burn the Ubuntu ISO onto a DVD or create a bootable USB. We suggest you use a USB drive (2 GB+) as installing from USB is faster than DVD. If you have a USB drive, use Universal USB Installer to make the bootable USB.

Connect the USB drive to the PC, backup data from USB drive, and then follow the steps given below to create bootable Ubuntu USB:

To create bootable Ubuntu USB:

a. Download Universal USB Installer from here. Run Universal USB Installer (it doesn’t require any installation).

b. Click I agree button on the License Agreement screen to proceed to the next step.

C. Here, you will be asked to select the Linux distribution. Select Ubuntu from the drop-down list and click Browse button to browse to the Ubuntu ISO file that you have downloaded in step 2. Enable the option named Show all drives and then carefully select your USB drive letter. Finally enable Format Drive (Erase Content) option and click Create button.

d. Your bootable Ubuntu USB should be ready within a minute.

Step 4: Once you have the bootable USB, restart your PC (make sure that the USB is connected to PC). Make necessary changes to the BIOS to enable USB booting and then restart the PC again. You will see following options:

# Run Ubuntu from this USB

# Install Ubuntu on a Hard Disk

# Test memory

# Boot from first hard disk

# Advanced options

# Help

Select Install Ubuntu on a Hard Disk option and hit enter key.

Step 5: Within a few seconds, you will be greeted with a welcome screen where you need to select your Language. Once dine, click Install Ubuntu button.

Step 6: In the following screen, Ubuntu setup offers options to download updates (while installing) and install MP3 plugin. Select both options and click Continue button.

Step 7: If your PC is not connected to the Internet, you will be asked to select a wireless network, if available. If you don’t have a wireless network at your place, simply select I don’t want to connect to a wi-fi network right now option and click Continue. And if you have a wi-fi network, select the network and click Continue button.

Step 8: This is the most important step of installation. If you are getting Install Ubuntu alongside with Windows 8 option select that option and click Continue. On the other hand if you are getting "This computer currently has no detected operating systems. What would you like to do?" message, select Something else option and click Continue to proceed to Installation Type screen.

Step 9: In the Installation Type screen, carefully select the drive that you have previously created for Ubuntu and click Delete button. You should now see free space entry. Select the free space entry and click Add button to create a Swap partition. Select Location of new partition as Beginning and then select Use as Swap. Click Ok button.

Next, in the Installation Type screen, again select on the free space and click Add button. This time, Select location of partition as Beginning, select use as EXT4 journaling file system and finally select Mount point as "/". Click Ok button.

Finally click Install Now button to start installing Ubuntu.

Step 10: In the next two screens, you will be asked to select your location and keyboard layout. In the last step, you will be asked to enter login details (user name and password). Once done, you will be asked to restart the computer.

Step 11: Restart the computer to see the following screen:

You may see Windows Recovery Environment option instead of Microsoft Windows 8 entry in the boot menu if you have installed Ubuntu after choosing “Something else” option in step 8. In simple words, Ubuntu 11.10 setup doesn’t recognize Windows 8 and adds Windows 8 entry as Windows Recovery Environment (or, at least, this is what I got when I installed Ubuntu 11.10 in dual boot with Windows 8 Developer Preview build).

Source: http://www.intowindows.com/dual-boot-windows-8-and-ubuntu/

Install Pulseaudio With Built-In System-Wide Equalizer In Ubuntu

About two years ago we had an article about a system-wide Pulseaudio equalizer. This tool is still used today but it's no longer developed and it doesn't work properly for everyone, so many users have been looking for alternatives.

Well, I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but Pulseaudio has, for a while, its own built-in system-wide equalizer. However, the Pulseaudio packages available in the official Ubuntu repositories are not build with equalizer support. In Ubuntu 13.04, Pulseaudio is finally build with equalizer support but the actual equalizer is missing from the package for some reason, even though it's available in the source.

So, to make things easier for you, I've create a PPA for Ubuntu 13.04, 12.10 and 12.04 with Pulseaudio built with equalizer support and with the actual equalizer enabled.

Since I've used the packages from the official Ubuntu repositories for this (Pulseaudio 2.1 for Ubuntu 12.10, 1.1 for Ubuntu 12.04, etc.) and I didn't even remove the patch that disables loading dbus (which is required for the equalizer to run, but we can manually enable this, I'll tell you about it later on), using this PPA should be safe and shouldn't break or even change anything for that matter. Further more, without manually enabling the equalizer, you won't even know its there, so if you don't like it, you don't even have to purge the PPA. You can, however, purge it easily if you want.

I expect the equalizer to work better in Ubuntu 13.04 (since Raring has Pulseaudio 3.0 while Quantal has 2.1 and Precise 1.1 and thus, older equalizer, etc.) and indeed it has worked great in my test under Ubuntu 13.04 but I've also performed a quick test in Ubuntu 12.10 and 12.04 and I didn't notice any issues. But this also depends on the hardware so only you can tell if it works ok for you or not. Also, depending on your hardware, in some rare cases this can break your sound, but you can simply undo step 5 and everything should be back to normal.

It's also worth mentioning that the equalizer doesn't come with any presets, so it's up to you to set the optimal values which might not be something easy to do. If you don't like this, try the old PulseaAudio System-Wide Equalizer which comes with presets.

Here's how the equalizer looks like:

If you resize the window horizontally, you'll notice that more bands show up so using it, you have a lot more control than with the old Pulseaudio Equalizer:

Install Pulseaudio with system-wide equalizer support in Ubuntu

Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail users don't have to add the PPA - you can simply download qpaeq (the equalizer) and place it in you path, like /usr/local/bin for example, and make it executable. If you do this, skip step 1 below. But you can add the PPA below since it's safe and you'll get the equalizer automatically.

1. To add the PPA (available for Ubuntu 13.04, 12.10 and 12.04), use the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/pulseaudio-eq
sudo apt-get update

Then, launch the Software Updater and upgrade the packages (or run "sudo apt-get dist-upgrade"). Make sure all Pulseaudio packages have been upgraded successfully!

2. To be able to use the equalizer, you'll need to install some extra dependencies:

sudo apt-get install python-dbus python-qt4 python-qt4-dbus pulseaudio-utils

3. Now, let's restart Pulseaudio. Open a terminal and copy/paste the following commands:

pulseaudio -k
pulseaudio &

4. Everything is ready now, but the equalizer needs two modules to be loaded to work, so open a terminal and copy/paste these two commands:

pactl load-module module-equalizer-sink
pactl load-module module-dbus-protocol

Now you can launch the equalizer. It doesn't come with a desktop file so either press ALT + F2 or open a terminal and type:

qpaeq

The equalizer should now start.

You can now play some music / video / etc. and try the equalizer. To see if it works, you can set the preamp (first slider on the left) to maximum or minimum. If the sound doesn't go up or down, open the sound settings and under Output, select "FFT based equalizer on Built-in...":

Some applications will only work with this while others will also work without changing this (I'm not yet sure exactly how this works, please leave a comment if you know more about this).

5. The modules we've loaded under step 4 aren't automatically loaded on system start. So if you want to be able to use the equalizer after a restart without having to run those two commands, you'll have to add those modules either to ~/.pulse/ for your user or /etc/pulse/default.pa for all users. Below, I'm going to add them to /etc/pulse/default.pa and for this, you'll need to open the file as root with a text editor:

gksu gedit /etc/pulse/default.pa

And at the bottom of the file, add this:

### Load the integrated pulseaudio equalizer and dbus modules
load-module module-equalizer-sink
load-module module-dbus-protocol

Then save the file and you're done.

Reverting the changes

If you want to revert the changes, you can simply just remove the lines you've added in step 5 from the /etc/pulse/default.pa file:

gksu gedit /etc/pulse/default.pa

And remove these lines:

### Load the integrated pulseaudio equalizer and dbus modules
load-module module-equalizer-sink
load-module module-dbus-protocol

Then save the file, restart the system and everything should be like before.

If for some reason you also want to purge the PPA (although this shouldn't be required), install PPA Purge with multi-arch support, then purge the PPA using the following command:

sudo ppa-purge ppa:webupd8team/pulseaudio-eq

Also see: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio/Examples (some bits from the Arch wiki were used in this article).

Source: http://www.webupd8.org/2013/03/install-pulseaudio-with-built-in-system.html

Ubuntu GNOME Becomes An Official Ubuntu Flavour

Posted: 11 Mar 2013 04:54 AM PDT Ubuntu GNOME, an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution that ships with GNOME Shell by default along with other GNOME applications that aren't available by default in Ubuntu, is now an official Ubuntu flavour. The news comes from the Ubuntu GNOME mailing list, where it is specified that there won't be a beta 1 release this week, but there should be a beta release at the end of the month and daily images should be available within a few weeks. This should make it easier to install and test because right now, there's no way of getting Ubuntu GNOME except for installing another Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail flavour and then install the Ubuntu GNOME meta packages. Ubuntu GNOME 13.04 will be released with GNOME 3.6 because Ubuntu 13.04 won't ship with GNOME 3.8 for the most part and since this is now an official flavour, it can't ship with a PPA, but you can use the GNOME 3 PPA which should get the stable GNOME 3.8 once it's released. Also, the official name is now "Ubuntu GNOME', without "Remix" which has been used in the previous (unofficial) release: The official name is now "Ubuntu GNOME"; no "Remix", no "Edition". I like the simplicity of this name and the GNOME Foundation Board has made it clear that we are not welcome to use derivative names like GNOMEbuntu as our official name. - Jeremy Bicha @ Ubuntu GNOME mailing list Source: http://www.webupd8.org/2013/03/ubuntu-gnome-becomes-official-ubuntu.html

How to Run Ubuntu on your Android Mobile

Android has always become a popular platform for open source mobile OS lovers and Ubuntu is always the best Opensource OS for desktop. Wouldn’t it be good if we can combine these two best OS at a common place and use them parallely on your device?

Yes! Your wish has came true. Some developers has already previously ported Windows 98, XP and other OS into an Android device and now its time for Ubuntu. If you are running a rooted android device then you can bring Ubuntu to your device using the Ubuntu installer which is available for free at Android Market.
You might also like

• Download AppZilla for Android – 40 Essential Tools In One App
• How to Run Android Apps and Games on Your Windows PC
• Access Your Favorite Android Apps Easily with SwipePad

Features of Ubuntu installer for Android

• Run complete Ubuntu system inside Android.
• Use Android and Ubuntu side by side.
• Highly optimized for ARM devices.
• Available in both “large” and “lightweight” according to your needs.
• Full functional Ubuntu update manager and software center.
• Access files on your SD card and internal memory from Ubuntu.
• Ability to set Ubuntu screen size on boot
• Easy to uninstall anytime you want.

It requires Android device with 1GHZ processor and Android version of 2.1 or higher to install Ubuntu on your device.
Download Ubuntu Installer [ Android Market Link]
Additionally you may like to check the compatibility of your device from the developer’s note.
If you have already done the mind makeup to install Ubuntu on your Android device then we would like to suggest you to try it on your spare device than your regular device.

Source:  http://www.yourdigitalspace.com/2012/02/how-to-run-ubuntu-on-your-android-mobile/