Enable Docky Settings in Elementary OS

I've been testing out the latest Elementary OS(Jupiter) on my Netbook. Elementary uses Docky as the default dock, it's a great app and I have used it extensively on standard Ubuntu. By default the dock does not autohide and on my 1024x768 netbook it's using way too much screen space. For some reason the Elementary team have decided to hide the dock settings by default.

To enable the Docky settings icon to appear in the dock do the following:

Open a terminal by pressing Ctrl + Alt + T or using the menus go Applications->Accessories->Terminal

Enter this at the terminal and hit enter:

gconftool-2 --set "/apps/docky-2/Docky/Items/DockyItem/ShowDockyItem" --type bool "true"

The Docky settings icon should appear on the left hand side of the dock.

It's the anchor icon on the far left

Alternatively you can do it via a GUI using gconf-editor.  To start gconf-editor open a terminal type gconf-editor and hit enter.

Select the "ShowDockyItem" option

Installing LAMP on Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal

This is a short guide to setting up LAMP(Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) on Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal.
If you are using 10.10 you can check out my LAMP setup guide here.

First step is pretty easy, open a terminal and enter the following:

sudo apt-get install lamp-server^

During the installation process you will be asked to enter you MySQL root password, after that you have a basic lamp stack set up.

The following steps are optional but recommended:

Install CURL for php.

sudo apt-get install php5-curl

Install mod rewrite for url rewriting.

sudo a2enmod rewrite

sudo gedit /etc/apache2/sites-available/default

This will open your sites config file, now find the XML block that looks like this:

<Directory /var/www/>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>

change the AllowOverride directive from "None" to "All".  The result should look like this

<Directory /var/www/>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>

now save and close the file.

Next restart Apache for the changes to take effect.

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

And that's it, happy coding!

Installing Google Chrome in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal

The deb package from Google Chrome download site does not currently work with Ubuntu 11.04(Natty Narwhal).  Luckily it's easy to just add the chrome PPA and install from the command line.

Open a terminal(Ctrl + Alt + T) and enter the following:

sudo -s

echo "deb http://dl.google.com/linux/deb/ stable non-free main" | tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list

wget -q -O - https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub | apt-key add -


apt-get update

sudo apt-get install google-chrome-stable

exit

And now chrome should be installed, have fun.