Dr. Chaos

Dropbox is a great piece of software that allows you to sync files among multiple computers and also back up you files online.

If you already use Dropbox and Ubuntu like me, and have upgraded to version 10.04 you may have noticed that the colored icons that Dropbox ships with, don’t really match the new Ubuntu theme monochrome icons. But don’t worry, it can be easily fixed.

First thing you are going to need is the new experimental version of Dropbox.

For 32bit you can get it here: http://dl-web.dropbox.com/u/17/dropbox-lnx.x86-0.8.57.tar.gz

For 64bit go here: http://dl-web.dropbox.com/u/17/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-0.8.57.tar.gz

After downloading you need to stop Dropbox. To do this just open a terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal) type:

dropbox stop

and hit enter.

Then extract the contents of the files you’ve Downloaded directly into your home directory and start Dropbox. Again in a termina:

dropbox start

and enter.

Well done! Now you have the experimental version. We are almost done.

Now the icons, first you need to get the monochrome icons: Dark panel icons or Light panel Icons

Then just unpack the icon folder within the archive into .dropbox-dist to replace the icons folder there.

Then restart dropbox as shown above.

Now my looks like this.

Dropbox Monochrome Icon

Some times you may not see the new icons right away because of dropbox’s cache. Try restarting your computer. If this doesn’t help just repeat the steps to install the experimental version and it should work.

Hope you enjoy it!

To get Dropbox click here.

The original monochrome icons were posted here: http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=7818

It will depend on the reader to judge how useful this is or if it is useful at all, but I do use it from time to time.

Whether you want to re install the same version of Ubuntu or you want to install it on a different machine this will save you some set up time.

The first time you install Ubuntu, if you do this one or two moths after release, you will notice that you need to install over 100 MB of packages updates and if you’ve been using it for a while you’ve already installed and updated the software you need. Well, I sometimes need to re install Ubuntu, because I messed it up and I’m too lazy to fix it or because I want it on a different computer.

You may have noticed that if you install a package via aptitude (or apt-get or Synaptic Package Manager) it downloads it from the net but if you uninstall it and later install it again it will not be downloaded and instead installed from the local cache. Much faster of course.

With this little scripts you can make this happen on a clean Ubuntu install saving you some downloading time. And probably some boredom as well.

To get started fire up a terminal.

First back up you cache:

mkdir -p ~/backup/var/lib/

sudo cp -R /var/lib/apt/ ~/backup/var/lib/

mkdir -p ~/backup/var/cache/

sudo cp -R /var/cache/apt/ ~/backup/var/cache/

mkdir -p ~/backup/etc/apt

sudo cp -R /etc/apt/ ~/backup/etc/

sudo chown -R $USER ~/backup

That will copy the apt cache and config to a “backup” folder within your home directory. Feel free to change that to whatever suits you best.

The you must, of course, copy that to some other media to either transfer to another computer or keep safe while you reinstall.

Now the restore process:

sudo cp -fR ~/backup/var/* /var/

sudo cp -fR ~/backup/etc/apt/* /etc/apt/

That will restore the files from the origin to the real location. After that run aptitude update and you are ready to install anything you had previously installed without the need to download it all over again. Including updates!

NOTE: this assumes that everything is back in your home directory. If this is not the case change “~” for the full path of the actual location.

Well hope this works for you!

From thie link you can get two scripts to do this. To use then un tar the file (tar -zxf aptitude-backup.tar.bz) and give then execution permission and then just run then with the location for the back up or restore from path as a parameter.

aptitude-backup.tar