meh.

This will just be a short topic on how to skin ubuntu and get it looking a little sweeter than the standard orange look. Basically, will find all that you ever need, including heaps of themes, wallpapers and icon sets at on gnome-look.

However, if you are like me and just download a theme for, in my case GTK 2.., and expect it to install, then get ready for a suprise . In most cases it was just a matter of opening “Appearance” under System -> Preferences -> Appearance, then dragging the theme tar-ball onto the theme section and away it goes. But if you are like me, then you may also want the icons that go with the theme to be applied as well? Some of the doco that I read suggested to copy the icon folder to /home/you/.icons. Then they would just show up in the appearance app under Customize -> icons. But every time I tried that nothing happened .

What i ended up finding was a few short commands that will get you started, at the very least:

sudo apt-get install gnome-themes-extras

sudo apt-get install gnome-extra-icons

sudo apt-get install gdm-themes

Between these three commands you will be automatically provided with a new list of themes, icon sets and even login pages.

I can really take no credit for this find, as the instructions came straight from Kris at Geekybits. So a big thanks to chris for putting this together for us

Recently I was asked to set up and network using OSX Server. This sounded like a fun challange considering I have never administered, and barely used mac’s before .

Just to clear up the situation, the mac is file serving the quicken data file. The clients are using pc’s and the client install for Quickbooks to connect to the mac share.

Anyway, I will try to stick to the topic! I wanted to talk about something which appeared yesterday, when the Quickbooks Premier install/file share sitting on the mac server started to give the customer headaches. It started with the Quickbooks clients locking up and not allowing the users to log. Well, I went about checking the perms on the data file and access rights on the clients but could find nothing wrong. So, I started googling, then discovered that Quickbooks uses the client “service” to manage user connections. This meant that I would have to install Quickbooks on the mac server .. At first I thought that was bullshit/sucked but then I had the idea to try “VmWare Fusion”.

What I ended up doing was installing vmware fusion on the server and a fully patched install of xpsp2. It was set up in bridged mode to allow the pc’s in the workgroup to see shares and connect to it via ip/name. Then I just preceded to move the quickbooks data files to the vmware instance of xp and created sim links on the server, so the clients would be transparently redirected to the new vmware files. Then somthing amazing happened.. it actually worked…weee

Well, now that has enlightened me to other prospects that you could use this same methodology on any non windows server for any software. The only downside would be a little performance lag, but that is better than not working at all