HOW-TO: things after fresh Ubuntu 12.04 Desktop installation as a computing server.

Hi all,
After installing Ubuntu 12.04 Desktop, you should install some packages which is very useful in long term. All of these tips, I collect from Internet. It's totally up to purpose of your machine. My machine is up to running experiments, workstation usages, not for entertainments.
1. If you occasionally build applications from source or make your own deb files, here are some basic packages you should install:

sudo apt-get install build-essential automake make checkinstall dpatch patchutils autotools-dev debhelper quilt fakeroot xutils lintian cmake dh-make libtool autoconf git git-core subversion bzr

2. I install Ubuntu on a workstation as a server. At home or office, you have a personal Windows machine. So, remote desktop logging into Linux workstation from a Windows computer is very important. I recommend you use X11rdp, because you can copy text or files between Windows and Linux computers. Other remote desktop protocols such as VNC don't have this feature. This feature is very useful for developments latter.

3. SSH connection.
If you are a fan of terminal and SSH, you should set up a SSH server on your workstation. Then, it is vital for a connection from Linux machine to a Linux machine w/o using remote desktop logging.

4. If you have a GPU, setting up NVIDIA driver and CUDA development kit are enlightened.

5. Sharing is important. Samba is the most useful way to share files between Linux and Linux machine. It is also compatible with Windows machine.
https://help.ubuntu.com/lts/serverguide/samba-fileserver.html

sudo apt-get install samba.

Peekaboo: Machine Learning Toolkits

Peekaboo: Machine Learning Toolkits: Wow. So much to read today . While following link upon link, I found so many great toolkits that I think it is worth listing them here. On...

Peekaboo: Favourite Code from Andy's blog

Peekaboo: Favourite Code: In gerneral I use Python with Numpy/Scipy/Matplotlib for most of my experiments, so most of these are python tools. Here are some projects ...

HOW-TO: set up Java environment on Ubuntu.

Hi all,
I am kind of big moving from Windows to Ubuntu including infrastructures, softwares, and even cultures. However, I still use both Windows and Linux. I cannot live isolated with surrounding Windows machine around me in labs even my laptop. Windows are simple and convenient for normal users, but Ubuntu is just great for developers.
I definitely love Eclipse. In this blog, we provide some guide to start Java life in Ubuntu. C/C++ life in Ubuntu are great and simple. I supposed that Java life is also simple across different OSs.
First, you need to install Java Development Kit (JDK) which includes Java Runtime Environments (JRE). Going to Oracle and download the newest jdk1.7 [1]. For example, I downloaded jdk1.7.0_51. Then I untar it.

tar xzf jdk-7u51-linux-x64.gz

 As a admin user, you can add or change these two lines in your /etc/profile to point to the installation and it will affect system-wide. OR as a normal user, you can export an environment variable in ~ /.profile. Where JAVA_HOME is the place you just untar your jdk, for instance, /home/tranlaman/Downloads/jdk1.7.0_51.

export JAVA_HOME=/home/tranlaman/Downloads/jdk1.7.0_51

export PATH=$PATH:$JAVA_HOME/bin

 Then, you log out and in again to see effect of the environment variables. After that, you download and install Eclipse from [2].
Further, if you want to install C/C++ plugin in Eclipse to develop C/C++ programs, you can follow this instruction. Go to Help/Install New Softwares, then add the C/C++ Development Toolkit (CDT) link in the box as http://download.eclipse.org/tools/cdt/releases/kepler.
You can replace kepler as the version of Eclipse. Then press Enter.

[1] http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk7-downloads-1880260.html
[2] https://www.eclipse.org/downloads/

HOW-TO: build OpenCV 2.0 on Ubuntu 64 bits 12.04 LT

Hi all,
Sometimes, you want to build an old version of OpenCV on Ubuntu 64 bits. It seems not to be easy as I think. I met this error. That was suck.

../include/opencv/cxoperations.hpp:1916:15: error: ‘ptrdiff_t’ does not name a type

../include/opencv/cxoperations.hpp:2465:31: error: ‘ptrdiff_t’ does not name a type

The reason is that library might lack of a header file [1]. Just add "#include <cstddef>" to corresponding headers file that generates errors including cxoperations.hpp. And hope it will solve your problem.

HOW-TO: know what I have passion on

Hi,
It is not a tech blog as usual. Instead, I write about how life could be complicated and what I think. Life is not as simple as it seems to be.

PATH: all you need to know

Hi all,
Previously, I write a blog about LD_LIBRARY_PATH [1]. Continuing this series, I write this blog about another important environment variable in Linux which is PATH.
PATH is the environment that contains paths to executable files. For example, /home/tranlaman/bin, /usr/local/sbin, /usr/local/bin/, /usr/sbin, or /bin.
Otherwise, LD_LIBRARY_PATH contains dynamic library for other programs.