WE DID IT! 21 years after the greatest NFL team ever went to the Superbowl, Sexy Rexy kicks ass and takes our new Ubuntu Chicago Bears to the Superbowl! Of course I lost money betting on the great New Orleans Saints, but hey, that was the best money I have ever spent or loss. Looks like we will be seeing Indianapolis in Miami in 2 weeks. Good luck guys and don’t forget to bring home the trophy.
Thanks to muzzol for the solution to the plug/unplug detection of an external USB mouse and disabling/enabling the Synaptics Touchpad. And now the answer you have all be waiting for!
Add the following line to your /etc/udev/rules.d/85-hal.rules file:
KERNEL==”mouse*”, RUN+=”/usr/bin/udevmice.sh”
Once you have added that, the next step would be to create the /usr/bin/udevmice.sh file. Here is what is in that file:
#!/bin/bash
#DATE=`date`
#FLOG=”/tmp/udev_test.log”
#echo “$DATE - [$*] - [$ACTION]” >> “$FLOG”
case $ACTION in
add)
#echo “DEBUG: conectat” >> “$FLOG”
synclient TouchpadOff=1
;;
remove)
#echo “DEBUG: desconectat” >> “$FLOG”
synclient TouchpadOff=0
;;
esac
Uncomment (remove the #) from the lines in the code if you want the script to log to /tmp/udev_test.log every time you plug/unplug your mouse. DO NOT remove the # from the #!/bin/bash line. And that concludes this tutorial. Thanks again to muzzol who left a comment in my previous post.
UPDATE: I forgot to mention that you need to make one small edit to your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file in order for the synclient command to work. Under InputDevice section, look for the Identifier for “Synaptics Touchpad”. This is where you want to add the following extra option:
Option “SHMConfig” “on”
Since I have gotten my new laptop I have quickly become annoyed that when I plug in my external USB wireless mouse my synaptics touchpad is still active. The touchpad is fine when I am not using an external mouse, but I can’t stand tapping it while I am typing. So yesterday while making some jokes towards Cody Somerville and Martin Meredith on writing a program to fix it, they said a quick script could take care of it in the mean time. So what I did is wrote an elaborate, super hacker, elite bash script that starts with X. So you want to see it? Well, I can show you that and not have to kill you afterwards! Here it is:
mousecount=`grep mouse /proc/bus/input/devices |grep Handler |wc -l`
if [ "$mousecount" -eq "1" ]
then
synclient TouchpadOff=0
else
if [ "$mousecount" -gt "1" ]
then
synclient TouchpadOff=1
fi
fi
What this does is executes the grep command and assigns the output to $mousecount. The first “if” statement tests to see if only 1 mouse is active, in my case it would be the touchpad and no external mouse, so it will insure it doesn’t get deactivated. If that doesn’t test out, the next “if” statement will see if it is equal to 2, meaning I have more than 1 mouse attached, the 2nd being the external USB wireless mouse. If it sees 2 mice, then it will execute the “synclient TouchpadOff=1″ command disabling the synaptics touchpad.
Pretty easy I think. Now if someone can come up with an even better way of doing this, please keep me informed. My little script is rather hackish, but it does what I want it to. I would love to see an application do this automatically when I plug or unplug my external mouse. Any takers 
I created 4 simple search plugins for Firefox for anyone who is interested.
Download the archived file to a directory and then extract it. After extraction, copy the files to /usr/share/firefox/searchplugins and enjoy!
So you really want to get involved helping out Ubuntu but just don’t know where to start, or maybe think you need to be some big-time programmer in order to help out. Well let me be the first, or maybe the hundredth, person to tell you that this is far from the reality of getting involved.
How I got involved: I started out helping with Kubuntu developers with testing. From here I learned about other teams such as the Wiki Team, the Maketing Team, the Laptop Testing Team, as well as a few others. Each of these teams, perfect stepping stones as a way into the community, are not small projects or teams, and actually are depended on by the developers in the community. For instance, the Wiki Team maintains the developer wiki as well as the community documentation wiki. The goal of the team is to ensure that the wiki’s keep a consistent style as well as the information provided is accurate and detailed enough to help everyone from the first-time user all the way up to the seasoned developer. The Marketing Team maintains the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, creates DIY Marketing information, and works closely with the Canonical marketers to ensure that Ubuntu is spread worldwide. I started out with these teams in which I was introduced to many of the great developers in which I have a privilege of working along side with every day. It was from here that I eventually stepped up in to more prominant community roles and get to work with the development of the system documentation, Kubuntu development, and now a new roll which came up recently, KDE Documentation.
No matter the amount of knowledge you have with Ubuntu or Linux, there is always a way for you to get started in helping out the Ubuntu community. Be it sitting in IRC and helping out users with their problems, helping out the developers test their applications, working closely with a Local Community Team (LoCo), marketing, or documentation, your help will always be greatly appreciated, and awarded every 6 months with what has shaped up to be one of the greatest Linux distributions of all time. To learn more about how you can get involved with Ubuntu, the Contributing to Ubuntu is a great page to start out with. The most difficult things with getting involved, which are not actually that hard, is learning IRC if you have never used it before (just as easy as using AIM, MSN, or ICQ), setting up a GPG (gnupg) key, signing the Code of Conduct and becoming an Ubuntero. Now when I say difficult, I am using it loosely and mean that it is really that easy to get involved.
Who knows, you just might get lucky and meet some great developers who have no problem in guiding you and teaching you even more than you could have ever imagined. Now that I am a part of the KDE project as well, it is just as easy over there as I am sure it is just as easy with GNOME, Enlightenment, Xfce, and more. When we say Open Source, we are not only talking about the code of the application, but we are also speaking about the community. The door is always open and you are always welcome.
We are currently sitting at the Buffalo Wild Wings in Elmhurst, Illinois. We is Freddy, his brother Eddy, Mike, Jim, Andrew, RJ and myself. We just ordered our meal after holding a great event at the Elmhurst Public Library. Discussion included the future of the group, business point visions, marketing plans, as well as creating a local medium for support. The future of the LoCo is bright, and with the group of guys that showed up today to share their visions there is no doubt we can make Ubuntu successful in Chicago. Images to follow!
