Thursday, 1 November 2012

How to turn off the Amazon search in the dash

The latest distribution of Ubuntu (12.10, Quantal Quetzal) has an improved search function, which by default includes searching Amazon. This can be very handy if you like Amazon, but it also raises concerns for privacy. The issue is hot topic in the Ubuntu community, with some saying, that it's a good source of revenue for the Canonical, the Ubuntu developers, but other's being concerned about the commercialisation of a open source operating system.
I think having Amazon included is a interesting option, but I do think, that it should not be default, but rather optional, maybe it could be included in the installation menu, when you set keyboard option, time zone, etc.
Also, Ubuntu is a international project, people from all over the world use this distribution, but Amazon is available only in selected countries.
To turn off the Amazon search, click on the Dash Home and search for privacy. Then turn the switch "Include online search results" to off.

This will turn off all online searches in the Dash.

Installing Japanese input on Ubuntu 12.10

In my last post I wrote about the terminal command that will enable Japanese input in Qt-4 applications, for example Anki, a flash card program for studying languages or basically anything else.
On localizing Japan, a step by step introduction on how to install the IBUS system is laid out, but when I followed it, I had the problem, that the IBUS icon did not show up in the toolbar, so I found a terminal command to fix that:

ibus-daemon -drx

Also, on Ubuntu 12.10, Ibus-qt4 should already be installed by default if you use the software centre to install Japanese input, but it did not work. I uninstalled it using

sudo apt-get remove --purge ibus-qt4

And reinstalled it using:

sudo apt-get install ibus-qt4

Now, Japanese input is working, but we'll see how it goes...