KISS ubuntu on a tablet for grandma || WIP

What I really wish worked but doesn't because unity's bar likes thinking my tablet pen clicks are drag-and-drops, and can't make sure that single-click always brings that icon's window above everything else:

Tabmixplus settings: TMPpreferencesfirefox.txt

 [post in progress:]
out-of-box, ubuntu 10.10 maverick meerkat works mighty fine on fujitsu t4220 lifebook. suspend, brightness, suspend. hibernate I'm not sure about.

done:
wubi install in chinese
vista: change boot order
ubuntu: autologin after 3 secs
ibus -- gconf-editor, super_l (not mod4, not super) to next-in-menu,
i wish tegaki was more useful :/
theme: giant red cursor, noticeable scrollbars
appearance: giant font sizes
firefox: giant font, tabmixplus settings to "single window single tab" mode, gmail autologin, minimalist gmail extension (last update: aug 2010, not completely function as of today but still nice), disable check for add-on updates, disable history except for cookies, install adblockplus, some flash stuff
firefox: add bookmarks, remove other buttons from toolbars, set homepage to gmail
gmail settings: keyboard shortcuts off, hide a lot of labels, Fail: about:config not needed, Fail: Prism doesn't work, Fail: it's ~/桌面 not ~/Desktop

discover "bug"? where dragging ibus language bar to any of unity's bars "locks" the bar :/ to fix, have to log-out, select "U. desktop edition, log-in and fix, log-out, select "UNR", log-in. I guess if you place it correctly, keeps me from having to worry about grandma dragging around the language bar. LB only needed because Pinyin allows switch to English, but this isn't reflected anywhere except on language bar, while turning Ibus on/off (aka switching to English) is reflected in notification area. Also, I hate that I can't move the Ibus icon around or make it larger.

lol at the random popups that turn up in english

ubuntu: disable screen locking (screensaver and suspend), edit power settings, disable automatic updates
remove crap from unity default menu, struggle in main to remove rest of icons, Fail: one desktop, experiment with double-click vs single-click, Fail: cannot change unity icons / menu bar size,

contemplate UROP working on ibus or a chinese handwriting recognition engine. could earn mone and chill with grandma more.

reflect that chrome netbook app was teh fails since i didn't describe my vision of an all-GUI gmail interface. nor integrating with chinese handwriting recognition.


:/ if only ibus and tegaki worked better. i skipped reading 小王子 with grandma for this, but i don't feel like I accomplished all that much...

Fail: can't solve issue of double-click unity, firefox is left with "another process already running", which if you close working window, click or double-click on FF icon doesn't work. Must hit close. (also, that pop-up is entirely in English :/)

Mouse settings: maximum drag and drop, minimum double-click,
keyboard: don't repeat key when hold and press,

Switch to Sand theme for more visible scrollbars. To investigate: how to make that "blue outline" when you're in a particular text input box more visible.

Tegaki: chinese handwriting recognition on ubuntu maverick [meerkat 10.10]

In short, in a terminal, type in:

sudo apt-get install ibus-tegaki
sudo apt-get tegaki-zinnia-simplified-chinese

Pinyin / keyboard-based Chinese IME works well enough in Ubuntu, but tablet recognition is iffy.

The tegaki 0.3.1 packages are already in the meerkat universe repositories. (ibus-tegaki, tegaki-zinnia-simplified-chinese), so it's super straightforward.

(if when you type in above the terminal says "can't find package", you need to enable to universe repositories. Via command line: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Repositories/CommandLine. Via GUI: go to [Applications > Ubuntu Software Center > Edit > Software Sources] and make sure that "universe" is checked.

Maybe you also need to install libzinnia0, not sure.

Yay, that's it! If you need to, start the Ibus daemon. [System > Preferences > Keyboard Input Methods] should prompt you to start the daemon if you haven't already. Then go to [Input Method > Select an Input Method... > Other > tegaki] and hit [Add].
You can also try [... > Chinese > Pinyin]  and hit [Add]. Note that that's a capital-P! "pinyin" is for typing the tone marks.

Now you can select "tegaki" as an Ibus input method like normal (by clicking the keyboard ibus icon in the notication area), and I think the default keyboard shortcuts are [left-alt + shift] for switching inputs and [ctrl-space] for turning Input Methods on and off.

Tegaki does some weird hogging-the-input on my computer sometimes, though, and I can't even turn it off via IBus>Restart. I have to go ps x | grep ibus, sudo kill -9 [process #], ibus-daemon (to restart ibus), which is silly.

I can't get the wagomu engine to install though. :/ grr it keeps saying "can't find wagomu.h"

Also, ibus and tegaki are teh fails compared to Vista [Business and Up]'s Tablet PC Input Panel recognition. Tegaki is unsuitable for my give-tablet-to-grandma project. Sometimes it works beautifully, but my dad and I spent 15 minutes trying to write "那" before we gave up. Also, there's no way to enter in pinyin to shore up the recognition fail, and there's no way to easily enter English characters. There's no way I'm going to tell my grandma "Then you go down to this corner here and click and pick English handwriting recognition."

I was puzzling over this and then I used Vista Biz's tablet pc UI and it did address all of these issues (of course, some issues are obviated because its handwriting recognition feature is, for the most part, accurate, so there's no need for a back-one-stroke in addition to a back-entire-strokes and delete-all-characters-I've-approved-but-not-yet-inserted = 3 delete buttons).

Of course, this means I should haxor on the tegaki code, but ?? I have no idea where to get started and wish I could just skype with the developer for 30 minutes. I bet that would save me 20 hours of confusion.

Also to consider:

• Running Vista Business in a VM inside Ubuntu (if I can find or order the restore media), writing code to access its input panel technology
• Plunking down 40 euros for http://www.visionobjects.com/en/webstore/buy-myscript-stylus

Alternatively, I could keep spamming my living group's mailing list and hope someone's interested enough to tackle this with me, or start spamming SIPB's mailing list

Also, my ssh is still more broken than not so I can't even anti-social-tastically whine on Zephyr and keep my daily realization that I hate computers from polluting the internets.

Useful command line of the day:

apt-cache search [search term]

e.g.

apt-cache search tegaki

Also,
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UsingTheTerminal

Installing AMP on Ubuntu (making a localhost)

Well, that was easy. Yet another one-step installation, yay!
In short,

 sudo tasksel install lamp-server

does the trick.

===

Installing LAMP (well, actually AMP) locally instead of accessing remote servers online helps with testing joomla/CMS installations, editing templates, not screwing up a live website, etc. The last time I tried to do this I got bogged down by all the articles that explained how to "install Ubuntu Server Edition," when what I really wanted to know was how to install AMP on top of the desktop version of Ubuntu. Also, the Ubuntu community documentation pages (that I turned to for help on wifi) were long and out-of-date on the subject of ApacheMySQLPHP.

Of course one option is installing the packages individually, but it turns out there's an easier way: Tasksel.

I typed in (at a terminal):

 user@user-desktop:~$ sudo tasksel install lamp-server

It immediately started downloading packages, prompted for a MySQL password, and the whole process was over in less than ten minutes.

To check that AMP installed properly, I entered "localhost" in my browser and voila, I was greeted with
Kehe. That made me smile.

Footnotes

System used: Ubuntu 9.04.

For a bit more info, see Ubuntu Forums - View Single Post - HOWTO: Setup easy web development environment (XAMPP)