2 weeks ago, I got an email from the team of Emmabuntus asking for a review for their distro.  I agreed that I will check it soon but I had been very busy then. So today I decided to give Emmabuntus a try.

In case you have never heard about Emmabuntus before, it is a distro based on Xubuntu and according to the email I got, the aim of Emmabuntus is to be user-friendly and light-weight so it can be used on old computers.

First impressions, download and installation

Emmabuntus doesnt have a dedicated website, it uses a page on sourceforge.net for introduction about the distro and hosting the download image files.

Currently, there are 3 image files to download and I picked the latest version which is based on Xubuntu 12.04. The file size is really bigger than my expectation, over 3GB. So if you want to try this distro, make sure you use a DVD or a big enough USB.

I used Unetbootin to create the bootable USB for Emmabuntus. It booted up with no problem and the installation process is just similar to that of Ubuntu or Linux Mint, so new Linux users wont have any trouble to install Emmabuntus. Make sure you select the right keyboard layout before installing because French layout is set by default in Emmabuntus.

The installation took quite long due to the big size of the ISO file.


Emmabuntus desktop

Right after booting up Emmabuntus the first time, you will be ask to select a setting for the Cairo Dock. There are 3 options by default and I picked the second one, called "Simple". After that, the dock will appear and it will be there in the next boot up.


One the default desktop of Emmabuntus, you got a panel on top and Cairo Dock at the bottom. On the top panel there are several applets. And on the Cairo Dock, there are many applications. All your internal partitions will be shown on the desktop by default.


The default wallpaper is bluish, with a quote in French at the top right corner. I think it means " One day, the world will be free!"

Pre-installed applications

Since the ISO file is really big, there are a lot of default applications here, which reaches to the level of redundancy. You have both Firefox and Chromium, 3 music players, several chat clients, 2 video players,  many games and educational apps,  4 dictionaries, and many other miscellaneous apps like wikipedia, free software news ... When you click on the Menu on the top panel, each time you hover the mouse on a section, a huge submenu will appear showing a lot of applications.

there are a lot of preinstalled apps for everything

In short,  there are a lot of pre-installed applications in Emmabuntus, and many of them were unknown to me before. And this is something I really dislike because I always prefer minimal distros with just some basic preinstalled applications.

Performance and problems

This review is quite short because there are too many bugs that didnt allow me to try anything with Emmabuntus. The most serious bug happened to the keyboard layout. I didnt know what was wrong but half of my laptop keys were malfunctioned. They just gave wrong outputs. I thought something was wrong with my keyboard but after checking with a liveCD of Linux Mint, everything was still fine. So I believe it must be a problem of Emmabuntus. And since I cannot use the keyboard with Emmabuntus, I had to ditch it after several hours of testing.

Another problem with Emmabuntus is that whenever I boot up, there is always a dialog box asking me for the root password for something I dont even know.

One more thing I noticed is that the plymouth image of the bootable USB is still that of Xubuntu. After installing Emmabuntus successfully, the plymouth image will be changed. But in my opinion, it still looks quite ugly. Besides the grub 2 menu still shows Ubuntu instead of Emmabuntus.

Conclusion

Perhaps this is the first time I write a negative review for a Linux distro but I really dont like Emmabuntus. It is just Xubuntu with a lot of redundant pre-installed applications, which make the distro really bloated. Moreover the developing team is too careless and neglectful, they didnt test and double check anything before releasing the distro. So eventually I removed Emmabuntus after 3 hours.

Vim is always my favorite text editor. I've been using Vim for over 2 years and still learning it. If you want to use Vim, the first thing you will need to know is how to navigate in Vim, since it is text-based. In this article, I will show you some basic navigation shortcut keys to use in Vim.


1. Basic navigation

The most simple way to navigate around in vim is by using the arrow keys. Another method is use the four key:
- k: move up
- j: move down
- h: to the left
- l: to the right

In case you dont want to press the same key many times, a shortcut method is to use these key with a number. For example, if you want to move the cursor to the right skipping 12 letters, you can just hit "12l" or hit "12" then press the right arrow key.

2. Navigate within a line

If you want to navigate to different position within a line, you have 4 shortcut keys:
- 0: move to the beginning of the line
- ^: to the first character of the line ( not a space)
- $: to the end of the line (space included)
- g_ : to the last character of the line ( there is a hyphen here)

3. Screen navigation

Once you open a text file in Vim, you can navigate in relation to text shown in just the screen, not the entire file. Here are the shortcut keys:

- H: to the first line in the screen
- M: to the middle line in the screen
- L: to the last line in the screen
- Ctrl+f: Jump forward one full screen.
- Ctrl+b: Jump backwards one full screen
- Ctrl+d: Jump forward (down) a half screen
- Ctrl+u: Jump back (up) one half screen

4. Navigate through paragraphs

You can use the 2 following key to navigate through paragraphs in Vim:
- {: to the beginning of a paragraph, you can press it again to move to the next paragraph
- }: to the end of a paragraph, and similarly you can press it many times to move to the next paragraphs

5. Open a file from a specific position

You can open a text file from a specific position with vim. For example, if you want to open a file from line #32, you can use the following command to open it:

 vim +32 / path/to/the/file  

You can also open a file from a specific word, for example, to open a file from a certain word, say "Newyork", you can just use the following command:

 vim +/Newyork /path/to/the/file  

And vim will open the file with the cursor at the word "Newyork".

6. Some other navigation shortcuts

- N%: Go to the Nth percentage line of the file.
- NG: Go to the Nth line of the file.
- G: to the end of the file.
- g: to the beginning of the file.
-  `": to where you were in normal mode last time
- `^: to where you were in insert mode last time

htop is an ncurses process viewer for Linux. It is somehow similar to top but much better. In this article, I will enumerate several useful tricks with htop. These tricks will be useful for those who work as a sysadmin.

1. Display processes in a tree structure

Displaying process in a tree structure is very useful, it is much easier to identify processes with a tree structure. To enable this view, you can press F5 or the key "t".

In this tree view, you can collapse or expand a specific process by pressing "+" or "-".


2. Display the setup menu

When you press F2 or "s" , the setup menu will appear, there are big 4 setup menus. In each big menu there are several submenus for you to select.

Meters: change the behavior of the meter bar
Display options: change the display options of htop
Colors: change the color theme
Columns: Choose what column needs to be displayed for the processes in the htop output


3. Change the default update interval

The default update interval of htop is around 1.5 seconds, to change it, you can use the following command to launch htop:

 htop -d n  

"n" is in tenths of seconds

4. Kill a process with htop

You can kill a process using htop. From the process list, just select the one you need to kill then press F9. A menu of signal will appear, to kill this process, select "SIGKILL" and hit Enter.


5. Kill multiple processes with htop

You can kill multiple processes with htop by grouping them first then using the SIGKILL signal. To group the processes, just select each process respectively then hit Space. The selected processes will be highlighted in yellow. To kill these processes, just hit F9 then select SIGKILL.


In case you select a wrong process, to un-select it, just hit Space again. To unselect all the selected proceses, just hit "u"

In the article about the tips to use the command line faster, I mentioned about bringing a command or a script to background if it takes a long time to run. In today's article, I will give some examples in details of how to manage background jobs in Linux.


1. Make a command run in background

If you want to run a command in background, just include an ampersand ("&") at the end of the command.

2. Send a currently running command to background

If you forgot to use the ampersand to run the command in background, you dont have to kill the currently running job then start a new background job. To send a currently running command to background, you will just need to suspend the command first by hitting Ctrl + Z, after that you use the "bg" command to send the job to the background.

3. Bring the background job to foreground

If you dont want to job to run in background anymore, you can just bring it back to foreground by using the "fg" command.

4. Bring a certain background job to foreground

One problem is that, you could run multiple commands or scripts in background and the "fg" command will just bring the most recent background job to the foreground. In case multiple jobs are running in background and you want to bring a certain one to foreground, you will need to check the jobs first. The command you can use to list all the background jobs is "jobs", just run this command and you will get a list of the background jobs.

A sample output of "jobs" will be like this:

 # jobs  
 [1]  Running         bash download-file.sh &  
 [2]- Running         evolution &  
 [3]+ Done            nautilus .  

After that, if you want to bring the #2 job to foreground, the command you can use is:

 fg %2  

5. Kill a background job

To kill a job running in background is easy, just use any kill command with the job ID number. For example, to kill the #1 job, the command you can use is:

 kill %1  

In Fuduntu 2012.3, the screen lock feature is enabled by default. Here are 2 methods you can use to disable it:

Method 1

On the Gnome menu, go to System > Preferences, scroll down the Preferences list and you will see the Screensaver option. Click it and the Screensaver Preferences window will open, then uncheck the option "Lock screen when screensaver is active" to disable screen lock:


Method 2

You can also use the tweaking too Ailurus to disable screen lock. On the Gnome menu, go to System Tools > Ailurus. On the Ailurus window, scroll down and you will see the screensaver option. Uncheck "Lock screen when screensaver is active" to disable screen lock:

Most Linux distros provide a package manager. Debian and its derivatives use apt-get, Arch Linux uses pacman and Fedora uses YUM. YUM stands for "Yellowdog Updater Modified" and just like the other package managers of the other distros, you can use YUM for installing, removing, updating packages ...

In today's article, I will show you some command examples of how to use YUM. This may be helpful for you if you are using Fuduntu, a derivative of Fedora, like me.

1. Install a package

The command to install a package with yum is just like with apt-get:

 yum install packagename  

You will need root access to run this command. After you hit enter, yum will ask you to confirm if you really want to this package. If you want to bypass this asking, you can use the option "-y":

 yum -y install packagename  

2. Uninstall a package

To uninstall a package with yum, the command is:

 yum remove packagename  

And just like with the install command, you will be asked to confirm if you really want to remove the package.

3. Search for a package to install

In case you dont remember the exact name of the package, you can use the following command to search for all the packages that matches the keyword and display it

 yum search keyword  

The keyword just needs to be a part of the package name. How long the search process takes and how many packages will be shown after the search depend on the keyword. The more specific the keyword is, the faster the search process will take and the search output will have less packages.

4. Display additional information about a package

If you want to view additional information about a package, you can use the following command:

 yum info packagename  

This command will give you a brief list of the description, the current version, the architecture, the size, licenses ... of the packag.

5. Check the installed packages

To get a list of the installed packages on your system, you can use this command:

 yum list installed | less  

6. Check the packages which a file belongs to

If you like to know which package a particular file belongs to, you can use this command:

 yum provides /path/to/file