ubuntu snippets

Crowd computing has been popular for some years and Its being used in finding a cure for cancer, detecting radio signals sent by aliens and finding next largest prime. BOINC client is popular in crowd computing and its run on millions of consumer computers to crunch numbers. For some reason I am not able to use BOINC client in ubuntu repository. So you have to download BOINC client from official homepage. I am using it to crunch numbers for SETI and at the same time to heat my room. Download BOINC client.

Get Helvetireader Greasemonkey script.

What is Yo Frankie ? Yo Frankie was initially known as project apricot. Project apricot was initiated to know whether it's possible to produce commercial quality professional game using opensource tools. And it was a success. During project apricot execution some extreme improvements were added to blender. And today you can write games inside blender with little effort. Get Yo Frankie! Download Yo Frankie! Yo Frankie! used crystal space rendering engine to render effects. If you are interested may be you can start coding your own Linux game from there.

Installing gsmartcontrol Download binary debs from following location and install them. And then use following command to start gsmartcontrol. sudo gsmartcontrol gsmartcontrol shows all the info about health status of your HDD's. And allows you to perform health checks. Download gsmartcontrol .

unetbootin allows you to install Linux distros to USB drive or an hard disk partition. These are the following distros supported by unetbootin. Ubuntu Fedora Debian Linux Mint openSUSE Arch Linux Damn Small Linux Puppy Linux FreeBSD NetBSD PCLinuxOS Gentoo CentOS Mandriva etc... These are the tools supported by unetbootin. Partition Magic Super Grub Disk Backtrack FreeDOS etc... Download unetbootin .

lighttpd is lighter, faster http server available out there and now its much more easier to setup. Install lighty sudo apt-get -y install lighttpd Enable FastCGI module sudo lighttpd-enable-mod fastcgi sudo /etc/init.d/lighttpd restart Install PHP support sudo apt-get -y install php5-cgi Setup MySQL sudo apt-get -y install php5-mysql mysql-server phpmyadmin cd /var/www ln -s /usr/share/phpmyadmin/ phpmyadmin sudo /etc/init.d/lighttpd restart Goto http://localhost/phpmyadmin/ and enjoy mysql management console. Thats it, now you have a lighttpd server that can crunch PHP pages.

Use following command to get some really cool fonts. sudo apt-get -y install ttf-larabie-deco ttf-larabie-straight ttf-larabie-uncommon Restart your gui session and you should have some really cool fonts.

If you are facing router problems or any other issues with ubuntu. First try to disable IPv6 support built into Ubuntu as majority of the current home hardware doesn't support IPv6 at the moment. Open the file /etc/modprobe.d/aliases and change the following line net-pf-10 ipv6 to net-pf-10 ipv6 off Reboot the system and check if you are still facing the issue.

These are the laptops which come with Ubuntu pre-installed. System76 Visit System76 Product Page Sylvania Visit Sylvania GNET28001SN Amazon Page Acer Aspire Dell

DapperFox allows you to create RSS feeds from sites which won't offer any RSS feeds. You can even customize existing feeds and share feeds with the members of the dapper community. Get DapperFox Firefox Extension

pidgin-facebookchat allows you to access the new Facebook chat from inside pidgin. Download pidgin-facebookchat .

debtree allows you to generate graphs using graphviz. Installing debtree First checkout code from the source repository todo that execute following command. git clone git://git.debian.org/~fjp/debtree.git Using debtree Now cd into the directory debtree . And execute following commands to generate sample graph ./debtree dpkg > out.dot dot -T png -o out.png out.dot gnome-open out.png Enjoy the dependency graphs.

Epidermis allows you to download and apply pigments in one click. Here a pigment is a pack of wallpaper, gtk theme, window manager theme, splash screen, gdm theme,etc... Installing epidermis Download epidermis deb package from this page and install it. Using epidermis Start epidermis from command line and start updating epidermis repo to find new themes. And apply any pigment that you like.

playonlinux is one of the tool that answers the question "How to play windows games on Ubuntu Linux ?" playonlinux seems to be similar to cedega except that playonlinux is open-source and free. playonlinux supports around 11 Linux distros. Although there is no package for Ubuntu Intrepid but adding Ubuntu Hardy sources file to my intrepid seems to be working fine. Installing playonlinux Use following commands to configure sources and install the playonlinux package. sudo wget http://deb.mulx.net/playonlinux_intrepid.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/playonlinux.list wget -q http://deb.mulx.net/pol.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add - sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install playonlinux Supported Games Star Wars : Jedi Knight II : Jedi Outcast Max Payne 2 : The Fall of Max Payne Star Wars : Jedi Knight : Jedi Academy Steam Guild Wars Half Life 1 Legacy Of Kain : Defiance Ragnarok Online Starcraft Star Wars - Episod 1 : Racer Star Wa...

This only works for 32bit linux. And I can't gurantee about 64bit ubuntu machines. Clean up previous installations of ath drivers and ndiswrapper. First add following lines to your /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist file. blacklist ath_pci blacklist ath_hal Now delete files left by previous installation of ndiswrapper. sudo rm -fr /etc/ndiswrapper/ Now open System >> Administration >> Hardware Drivers and disable all atheros drivers. Install ndiswrapper sudo apt-get -y install ndiswrapper-common Download 32 bit driver . Extract the archive and execute following command from the folder where you extracted the contents. sudo ndiswraper -i net5211.inf Use following command to see whether the driver is correctly installed. sudo ndiswrapper -l Execute following command. sudo ndiswrapper -ma Now add following line to the file /etc/modprobe.d/ndiswrapper at the end. alias wlan0 ndiswrapper Reboot and enjoy using your wireless lan network. Seems like thi...

Elisa is a OpenGL powered media center solution for Linux and its also available on other platforms too. Elisa comes up with numerous plugins and features and competes with commercial quality software. Installation of Elisa sudo apt-get -y install elisa elisa Features Watch pictures, movies and video clips Play music with visualizations and automatically fetch album art from Internet. Tune into Internet radio stations. Supports vast number of audio and video codec's. Access Media servers located on LAN. Flickr & Youtube integration.

Using both JSSH and FireWatir you can remote control Firefox browser and do complex web tasks which can't normally do. Here is the guide on how to get started. Install JSSH for Firefox 3 Visit OpenQA JSSH installation page to install JSSH . Install Ruby FireWatir sudo gem install firewatir Test FireWatir Copy following code into some ruby file and execute the file to test the setup. require 'rubygems' require 'firewatir' include FireWatir ff = Firefox.new ff.goto("yahoo.com") ff.close

I did not wish to reinstall Windows XP. I tried fixing it with virus scanners and registry cleaners, recovery tools and so on, but it remained infected, slow, buggy, and increasingly weird. So I saved what I could, wiped out the hard drive, and started over... Read Rest of I Win

Ubuntu Tweak allows you to tweak various ubuntu settings in one place, clean your system and many other useful tasks. Installing Ubuntu Tweak Add following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list . deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/tualatrix/ubuntu intrepid main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/tualatrix/ubuntu intrepid main And execute following commands to install ubuntu tweak . sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get -y --force-yes install ubuntu-tweak

Download Dust Theme

Linux Distribution Chooser is a little wizard that recommends a linux distro based on your responses. Find A Linux Distro that Works for You.

playdeb.net provides deb packages for games. To install games provided by playdeb.net you have to do following setup. Add following line to sources.list file. deb mirror://www.getdeb.net/playdeb-mirror/hardy/// hardy/ Now do an apt-get update. sudo apt-get update Available Games Alien Arena 2007 Alien Blaster Amoebax AssaultCube atanks Barbie Seahorse Adventures Bos Wars Charge CRRCSim DreamChess ETSwitch FreeCiv FreeCol gBrainy Glest Globulation 2 GLSFcave GridWars 2 InterLogic Irrlamb jMemorize LordsAWar ManiaDrive Mupen64Plus Monsterz Nexuiz Nimuh numptyphysics Open Tyrian Enhanced OpenArena PainTown PCSX2 Phun PipeWalker PokerTH PyChess Really Rather Good Battles In Space ri-li Sauerbraten Scorched3D ScummVM Second Life Secret Maryo Chronicles Slime Volle...

auto-apt is useful to people who install things from source. Have your ever had frustration with ./configure ? because of gazillion number of dependencies which weren't already installed. Well auto-apt solves this problem by installing packages on the spot when your are doing ./configure to check perquisites. Installation As usual you have to install this if you want to use it. Use following command to install auto-apt package. sudo apt-get -y install auto-apt And execute following commands to populate its database and make it usable. sudo auto-apt update && sudo auto-apt updatedb && sudo auto-apt update-local Usage Form now on instead of executing the command ./configure use the command auto-apt run ./configure Thats it auto-apt will look for missing perquisites and installs them on demand.

Today torrentfreak.com published an article on how to setup bittorrent based system ugprades . Now you can get intrepid ibex upgrades over bittorrent. apt-p2p ubuntu thread.

This guide explains how to find rootkits, worms, Loadable Kernel Modules(LKMs) using chkrootkit. But first we need to install chkroot package before we start using it. sudo apt-get -y install chkrootkit Now run the following command to check for presence of infected binaries. sudo chkroot chkroot command checks for following worms, rootkits and LKMs lrk3, lrk4, lrk5, lrk6 (and variants) Solaris rootkit FreeBSD rootkit t0rn (and variants) Ambient's Rootkit (ARK) Ramen Worm rh[67]-shaper RSHA Romanian rootkit RK17 Lion Worm Adore Worm LPD Worm kenny-rk Adore LKM ShitC Worm Omega Worm Wormkit Worm Maniac-RK dsc-rootkit Ducoci rootkit x.c Worm RST.b trojan duarawkz knark LKM Monkit Hidrootkit Bobkit Pizdakit t0rn v8.0 Showtee Optickit T.R.K MithRa's Rootkit George SucKIT Scalper Slapper A, B, C and D OpenBSD rk v1 Illogic rootkit SK rootkit sebek LKM Romanian rootkit LOC rootkit shv4 rootkit Aquatica rootkit ZK rootkit 55808....

Installation Add following lines to /etc/apt/sources.list deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/pyroom-dev/ubuntu hardy main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/pyroom-dev/ubuntu hardy main Now install pyroom. sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install pyroom

This live DVD contains native Linux games which can be run directly without installation. Game state can be saved to a USB stick. Supported Games Astromenace - Astromenace is a brilliant 3d scroll-shooter allowing you to feel the adrenalin rush of a fierce space battle against relentless swarms of alien invaders. Blobby2 - Blobby2 is the gpl-ed sequel of Blobby Volley, a very famous freeware game. Boswars - Boswars is a futuristic real time strategy game (RTS). Btanks - Btanks is a funny battle on your desk, where you can choose one of three vehicles and eliminate your enemy using the whole arsenal of weapons. BzFLag - BzFlag is a free online multi player cross-platform open source 3D tank battle game. Foobillard - Foobillard FooBillard is a free billiard game for Linux using OpenGL and comes with realistic physics for a great billiard experience. gl-117 - gl-117 is an action flight simulator for Linux/Unix and MS-Windows. Glest - Glest is a real time strategy game...

The widget factory is a small application that allows previewing gtk themes without applying them system wide. Installation Install the package thewidgetfactory . sudo apt-get -y install thewidgetfactory Use following command to launch the widget factory. twf

MonoDevelop is an IDE for developing .Net compatible applications for *nix & windows platforms. It support .Net, C++, C#, Java and several other languages. Offers code completion, project management, build management, Database management, Version control, and Add-In support for implementing other features. Installation You need to install the package MonoDevelop . sudo apt-get -y install monodevelop Fetaures Workbench - Offers different types of pads for project management to deployment. Customization - Offers different layouts just like eclipse so that you can have different views when doing different things.(debugging, editing, GUI building) Database management. Version control. Visual Studio integration. Inbuilt .Net C#, Gtk# documentation. Language translation support. Package and deployment for different operating systems. Gui builder "GTK# Designer".

Execute following command and restart your gui session to enable autohinting. sudo ln -sf /etc/fonts/conf.avail/10-autohint.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d/

Shiki Colors Theme

Default Ubuntu media players ship with boring and very minimal visualizations. Here is the guide to get bucket load of visualizations on Ubuntu. libvisual plugins This package adds around 8 more visualizations to Rhythmbox. BTW visualizations shipped with this package doesn't work in totem at least for me. To install this package execute following command. sudo apt-get -y install libvisual-0.4-plugins

To temporarly disable system beep for current session use following command. sudo rmmod pcspkr To perminently disable system beep add following line to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist file. blacklist pcspkr

For Intrepid deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/openoffice-pkgs/ubuntu intrepid main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/openoffice-pkgs/ubuntu intrepid main For hardy deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/openoffice-pkgs/ubuntu hardy main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/openoffice-pkgs/ubuntu hardy main Download OpenOffice 3.0 Another way is to directly download relevant OpenOffice 3.0 binary deb archive from this download page and install it. Make sure you uninstall previous version of OpenOffice before installing newer one.

You can configure Rhythmbox to act as central media server using its built in plugin support. Using this ability you can access your media(music or videos) from remote location. Installation First you need to install python-coherence package. sudo apt-get -y install python-coherence Now open Rhythmbox >> Edit >> Plugins and check DLNA/UPnP sharing and control support . From now onwards when ever you start rhythmbox all of your UPnP compatiable devices and software applications will show the Rhythmbox served media server.

Gimp 2.6 just released and you can install it right away. For hardy deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/getdeb.packages/ubuntu hardy main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/getdeb.packages/ubuntu hardy main getdeb.net has latest gimp 32bit deb packages for ubuntu hardy. 32bit GIMP 2.6 packages for ubuntu hardy. For intrepid deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/c-korn/ubuntu intrepid main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/c-korn/ubuntu intrepid main Paste above repo section that corresponds to your Ubuntu version inside file /etc/apt/sources.list . Make sure you add these lines at the top of sources.list . Then do an apt-get update and reinstall gimp.

If you have a machine that is exposed to external network then there is a chance that some bot is poking your machine and you need to harden all entry points of your machine. fail2ban is a small program that monitors all your authentication logs for failed login attempts and blocks the bots depending on the thresholds that you specified in configuration file. Installation sudo apt-get -y install fail2ban fail2ban blocks bots for only 600 seconds. To change this setting you have to open /etc/fail2ban/jail.conf and change the configuration option bantime . And restart fail2ban using following command. sudo /etc/init.d/fail2ban restart

Fortunately winehq maintains an ubuntu repo that contains deb packages of latest wine development releases. Presently the latest version is 1.1.4. This latest version contains cutting edge DirectX support and other improvements. Make a note that these deb packages may not be properly tested and you may face occasional breakage in functionality of wine. Installation Execute following command to add apt trust keys. wget -q http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/387EE263.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add - Execute following command to add new wine repository. sudo wget http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/sources.list.d/hardy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/winehq.list Update apt sources. sudo apt-get update Now if wine is already installed then do an upgrade sudo apt-get -y upgrade Other wise install wine sudo apt-get -y install wine Check wine version by issuing following command. wine --version

This ubuntu wiki page describes steps for setting up JeOS virtual machines with out using iso images. Please test these steps and give your feedback to ubuntu developers. Ubuntu JeOS VM Builder

Subdownloader 2.0 is one fine automatic subtitle downloader. Its written in QT4 using python and has very friendly user interface. Installation Subdownloader deb packages are not yet included in repo but you can download them from Subdownload 2.0 launchpad page . Download & save two deb packages subdownloader-cli-xxx_all.deb and subdownloader_xxx_all.deb packages to desktop. Now open terminal and change to Desktop directory and issue following command. sudo dpkg -i sub*.deb Apt will complain telling that you have some unmet dependencies and will exit. Execute following command to install those dependencies along with subdownloader. sudo apt-get -f install Usage Now launch subdownloader by issuing following command in terminal. subdownloader Now select directory that contains movies and subdownloader will automatically search for subtitles on net. Select the subtitles that you want and click Download button to start downloading subtitles. Enjoy.

Apache is pretty useful for sharing files on network particularly on LAN. Here is how to map an external folder to an url on your apache server. Lets assume your user name as bob and the path of the folder that you want to share is /home/bob/downloads . And you want to access contents of this folder at url /downloads . Change directory to /etc/apache2/sites-enabled . And create file named downloads with the following contents. Alias "/downloads" "/home/bob/downloads" <Directory "/home/bob/downloads"> AllowOverride None Options Indexes Order allow,deny Allow from all </Directory> Save the file and close it. Now restart the apache by issuing following command. sudo apache2ctl restart Now test everything is working as expected by going to following url in your browser. http://localhost/downloads

Gimp has so many usability issues and GIMP team is going to address some of them in 2.6 version. Gimp 2.6 will have only one menu bar One of the primary usability issue that confuses newbies is two global menu bars (One in tools palette & second one in image window). Now Gimp is going to get rid of tools palette menu bar and display only one menu bar in image window. So image window is always open and its background defaults to gray if there is no image in use. GEGL support Current implementation of GEGL is going to pave a way for future CYMK support. CYMK is important for professionals to accurately print images with exact colors. This is not much important for web developers & home users and they can live without CYMK. Dockable dialogs Another much awaited GUI improvement. This is really useful to people who switch between different tool dialogs. There are many more improvements to Gimp 2.6 and lets see whether its going to be interesting to use.

Are you using "kill -9" to kill process ? kill -9 won't allow processes to execute cleanup code before terminating them. And remember this when writing shell scripts. Complete article on Useless use of kill -9

xmonad is one of the tiling window manager available for screen space conscious people. Moving mouse on a large screen or multi head setup is pretty time consuming and tiling window managers offer you a choice between keyboard or mouse. Here is the guide on how to install xmonad and how to use it. We will also get to know little bit about other tiling window managers too. Installing xmonad Latest version of xmonad is available right out of Ubuntu universe repository. Execute following command to install xmonad and other little application launching utility called dmenu. sudo apt-get -y install xmonad dwm-tools Restart your current session or logout of current session and re-login with xmonad selected. You will see an empty desktop & stop banging that keyboard thinking something went wrong. Read remaining post before continuing. Terms Most of the tiling window managers have concepts like Master Pane, Tile Pane, Layout, Workspace, Frames. Frame Frame contains nothi...

Are you using unstable video driver ?, Do you have older hardware which is not properly supported ?. If this is the case then the chances are that your hardware is blacklisted by compiz. But compiz provides a nifty way to skip these checks. Execute following command to start compiz without black list checks. SKIP_CHECKS=yes compiz Another way is adding following option to ~/.config/compiz/compiz-manager file. SKIP_CHECKS=yes

Download "Kamel Icons" icon theme from Gnome Look.

Download "Red Icons" icon theme from Gnome Look.

Evolvotron is a random image generator using algorithmetic mutations. It sometimes generates stunning pattens, textures and inspirational art. Above image generated using evolvotron in just couple of mutations. And its available as a wallpaper for download at Gnome-look . A tip for beginners is to start with a tile that has lot of variations. Installation Evolvotron is available in Ubuntu universal repository and use following command to install it. sudo apt-get -y install evolvotron Usage Check out help menu to get info on keyboard shortcuts and command line options.

Installation Garb Wine Doors deb package from wine-doors.org site download section . And save the deb file wine-doors _all.deb to into your download folder. Download should complete pretty quickly because package is very small. Execute following command from the download folder to install wine-doors deb package. sudo dpkg -i wine-doors*_all.deb Now start Wine Doors by clicking on Applications > System Tools > Wine Doors . Features Wine Doors provides a feature called bottles. Bottle concept is borrowed from crossover office a popular commercial alternative of wine. Where a bottle is an isolated environment in which you can run one or multiple windows applications without interfering with other bottles on the systems. Wine Doors has community that constantly tests existing windows applications for compatibility of wine and adds them to the Wine Doors repository. So these applications are available for you to be installed with a single click using synaptic package manager...

This guide explains how to get Linux mint like start menu on Ubuntu. Ubuntu System Panel This application is just a gnome panel applet pretending like improved version of windows start menu. So lets get started. Installation Ubuntu System Panel is not included in repositories but fortunately its simple to install. First checkout source code. svn checkout http://ubuntu-system-panel.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ ubuntu-system-panel Execute following command to install it. For that first go into the directory ubuntu-system-panel and execute following command. ./usp_update install fresh Execute following command to reload gnome-panel. killall -9 gnome-panel Now right click on any ubuntu panel and add "Ubuntu System Panel" applet.

When you remove some packages using apt-get remove they are not completely removed and some configuration files are left. You can confirm this by executing following command. dpkg -l | grep -i ^rc Execute following command to remove all traces left by alredy removed packages. dpkg -l | grep -i ^rc | awk '{print $1}' | xargs -n 10 sudo aptitude -y purge Above command cleans up 10 removed package traces at a time.

This guide explains how to compile firefox on ubuntu with optional jssh support. Install dependencies Execute following command to install necessary headers required to build Firefox. sudo apt-get build-dep firefox-3.0 Fetch sources Execute following commands to checkout latest sources from Mozilla cvs. cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs-mirror.mozilla.org:/cvsroot co mozilla/client.mk cd mozilla make -f client.mk checkout MOZ_CO_PROJECT=browser Specify build options Create a new file named .mozconfig in current directory and copy paste the following build options into it. mk_add_options MOZ_CO_PROJECT=browser mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/firefox-jssh ac_add_options --enable-extensions=default,jssh,webservices ac_add_options --enable-application=browser Build the Browser make -f client.mk build Run the browser ./mozilla/firefox-jssh/dist/bin/firefox -jssh Check whether jssh is working or not by telnet into it. telnet localhost 9997 Now you should see the ...

Ubuntu live CD's offer tasting full Linux experience without disturbing existing software setup. And there are couple of official & unoffical derivatives based on ubuntu and we are going to examine each and every one of them. Please note that what ever the work you do with the Live CD's only persists in that session. If you want to use live CD's with persistence then following this official Ubuntu guide on Live CD persistence . Ubuntu This is official Ubuntu distribution developed in coordination with open source contributors. This version if shipped with various tools that are helpful for both office & personal productivity. Again Ubuntu is available in two variants desktop & server editions. Both the variants of ubuntu are free and you will get free software & security upgrades. Official Ubuntu Website Kubuntu This is official Ubuntu distribution with KDE window manager. KDE 4 which is redesigned from scratch gives you pleasant kubuntu e...

There are many ways to upgrade from one version of Ubuntu to another. And one of them is by using ubuntu update manager in your system manager. There is alternative way to upgrade your system to newer stable release of Ubuntu. But for this method to work you need to install a package and execute following command to do that. sudo apt-get -y install update-manager-core Now execute following command to start your system upgrade. sudo do-release-upgrade From now on just follow the instructions on the screen. If you want to have additional control over upgrade process then execute above command with --help flag.

Traffic shaping on Linux system used to require knowledge of lot of things like iptables, qdiscs & networking protocols. Things have changed and now there are couple of tools which handle all of this complexity without requiring much knowledge. And one of them is wondershaper . First install wondershaper by issuing following command. sudo apt-get -y install wondershaper Use following command template to make it work right away. sudo wondershaper <interface name> <down speed> <up speed> Where interface name is your network interface name like eth0 or eth1 or wifi0 and down speed , up speed are self explanatory and specified in kilo bits per second. So sample command will look like sudo wondershaper eth0 512 512 To disable wondershaper from controlling particular interface use following command. sudo wondershaper clear <interface name> To make these changes permanent add following lines to /etc/network/interfaces under relevant interface section. ...

Specto is a little Linux application that allows you to monitor various things like websites and emails. To install specto execute following command. sudo apt-get -y install specto website monitoring You can use specto to watch website changes on items like individual pages, feeds, images. You can tell specto to ignore something that changes on every visit by using "Error Margin" feature. You can tell sepcto to look for changes on fixed intervals by configuring "Refresh Interval". Don't specify too little value for this setting as it will cause heavy load on server.

By default applications launched with sudo will not have any theme and they look ugly. To fix this problem open your terminal and execute following commands. sudo ln -s ~/.themes /root/.themes sudo ln -s ~/.fonts /root/.fonts sudo ln -s ~/.icons /root/.icons After executing above commands any gui application launched with sudo privileges is properly displayed with current users theme.

Is your Firefox scroll is jerky ? Are you seeing CPU spikes during scrolling ? Try disabling pango ! Pango is part of Cairo graphics responsible for drawing internationalized text. Unfortunately in some cases pango consumes significant amount of CPU time when rendering text on web pages and this leads to jerky Firefox scrolling. To test whether pango is the cause open your terminal and issue following command. export MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1 Now execute firefox command to start Firefox. After this step if you see significant improvement in experience then execute following command otherwise look somewhere else to fix your problem. echo "export MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1" >> ~/.bashrc

Installing proprietary graphics drivers on Ubuntu is not an easy task because if you miss even a single step that single mistake could render all your effort worthless. But there is tool to automate this and its called " Envy ". There are two version of envy available. Envy Legacy - Envy legacy can be used to install ati & nvidia proprietary drivers on Ubuntu versions gutsy or lower. EnvyNG - Allows you to install both ati and nvidia dirvers only on Ubuntu hardy. With envy legacy you have to take care of little things when upgrading to newer distributions. But with EnvyNG this maintenance is no longer needed. Every thing is automatically taken care when you upgrade your distribution Installation guide for Envy legacy Insallation guide for EnvyNG

Firefox by default enables spell check for textarea controls only and this is little annoying. Here are the steps that you can use to enable spell check in both multi line and single controls. Enter about:config in Firefox address bar. And search for following key. layout.spellcheckDefault Change the value of the key to 2 . Following are the possible values above key takes. 0 - Disable spellcheck all to gather 1 - Only enable spell checking for multi line controls. 2 - Enable spell checking for both multi line and single line controls i.e both text fields & text areas.

Quanta is a full featured KDE programming editor. Quanta now has support for DBGp debugging protocol. Install quanta by by issuing following command. sudo apt-get -y install quanta Configuring xdebug Install xdebug using previous blog post on Debugging PHP using xdebug . After installing xdebug add following configuration options to your /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini . xdebug.remote_enable = 1 xdebug.remote_handler = dbgp xdebug.remote_mode = req xdebug.remote_port = 9000 xdebug.remote_host = localhost Now restart your apache using following command. sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart Configuring quanta You can debug php scripts only in projects. Create a new project in quanta and add /var/www to it. Open project properties, select DBGp from Debugger combo box and accept remaining default settings. If you followed previous steps and debugging on local machine then you don't have to do anything else. If you have to change debug port and server url then click on Options...

Lorem Ipsum generator is a an application hosted on Google code. It generates lots of dummy text that can be used to fill your GUI designs and web page mockups. This text is particularly useful in designing gui with out any distraction. Installation Get lorem ipsum generator deb package from following link http://code.google.com/p/lorem-ipsum-generator/ Now click on downloaded to deb package to install it in GUI way. Usage Just launch the application using the command lorem-ipsum-generator . After launching your application you will be presented with options to generate either Paragraphs or Sentences with specified quantity. Later you can copy generated text to clipboard and use it in your application design.

There are many variants of Ubuntu. One of them is Ubuntu JeOS where JeOS stands for Just enough Operating System . JeOS is a lean version of Ubuntu server and optimized for running in virtual machines like VMWare. But it can also be used to setup your own Ubuntu that matches your taste without extra luggage. I will get you started by showing you how to setup minimal GUI. Later you can make customizations by installing applications that you like. So lets get started. Download Ubuntu JeOS Download Ubuntu JeOS iso image from following url and install it either in VMWare or VirtualBox. Download Ubuntu JeOS Installing GUI This part of guide can be used to install GUI on ubuntu server. First update your apt cache by issuing following command. sudo apt-get update You may install either xdm/gdm/kdm for login manager. Since xdm is lighter than others I prefer installing it. sudo apt-get -y install xdm Install core of gnome with out any extra baggage. sudo apt-get -y insta...

phonetooth can be used to chat with mobile users and transfer files from ubuntu desktop system. Its written in python. phonetooth uses gammu as its backend and because of this reason it supports most of the phones from Samsung, SonyErricson, Nokia & Motorola. Installation Download sources from Google Code and unpack. Now execute following command to prepare build environment ./configure --prefix=/usr Now execute following command to install it. sudo make install

There is a new circular menu project that is being hosted on Google code. This program runs in composite environment like compiz. Currently there is no package for this application you have to compile and run it from command line. You can navigate this application by using keyboard keys PageUp, PageDown,Home & End keys. Visit Circular application menu project.

Optimize ubuntu boot sequence by profiling it While you are in grub menu highlight your preferred kernel version and press "e" . Highlight the line beginning with kernel and press "e" again. Press End key in order to goto end of that line. Add a word "profile" without quotes to that line and press Enter . Now press "b" to continue booting. This one time special boot may take more time than ordinary boot. But during this boot ubuntu monitors file usage and preloads those files during subsequent boots. prelink Any executable that makes heavy use of shared libraries can benefit from prelinking. Prelinking resolves addresses of shared libraries in advance this reduces number of relocations. Prelink is also useful in the context of security since we can tell prelink to make libraries load at random addresses until next run of prelink. This is useful since libraries won't load at fixed addresses on every system. You can install pre...

webilder is a convenient little application that downloads and sets flickr photos as your desktop wallpapers. webilder no longer provides repository sources for either gutsy or hardy. But getdeb provides Debian packages for both gutsy and hardy including 32 & 64 bit architectures. Installation Goto http://www.getdeb.net/app/Webilder and download debian packages that correspond to your processor architecture & ubuntu version. Now install both webilder & webilder-gnome packages using following command. sudo dpkg -i webilder*.deb Usage Click on your gnome panel add choose +Add to Panel menu item. You will see list of gnome panel applets. Select Webilder Desktop Applet and drag and drop it on to gnome panel. Right click on webilder icon on gnome-panel and select Download Photos . webilder by default downloads interestingness photos from flickr. These interestingness photos are usually high quality photos tagged by flickr community. Beware that these photos some t...

fusion-icon is a nice little applicaion that sits in system tray and provides GUI means of doing compiz common operations. With fusion-icon you can easily do following things without touching terminal. You can launch compiz settings manager & emerald theme manager. Reload or select a new window manager. Allows you to choose either gtk window decorator(metacity) or emerald. Execute following command to install fusion-icon . sudo apt-get -y install fusion-icon And add fusion-icon command to your sessions.

See the blogpost on xdebug installation before continuing. Enable Proiling You need to add following line to /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini to enable profiling of php scripts. xdebug.profiler_enable=1 Now restart the apache server by issuing following command. sudo apache2ctl restart When ever you access a php page through apache, xdebug will create a file something like cachegrind.out.15093 . xdebug by default uses /tmp directory to dump files which contain profiling information. You can change this target directory by using xdebug option xdebug.profiler_output_dir and you can change result file name by using the option xdebug.profiler_output_name . See more xdebug profiling options . Some times you don't want to profile all requests. xdebug provides a selective mechanism to trigger profiling of specific requests. In order to enable this option you have to add following configuration option to php.ini . xdebug.profiler_enable_trigger=On Now you can trigger profilin...

xdebug is an open source debugger available for PHP. xdebug can be used to display more information in error traces. It can also be used to collect detailed code coverage & profiling information. Installation You need to install following packages to prepare environment for installation of pecl module xdebug. sudo apt-get -y install php-pear php5-dev build-essential Now we install xdebug using pecl. sudo pecl install xdebug Above command will download, compile & install xdebug on your system. Configuration Open /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini and append following line. zend_extension=/usr/lib/php5/20060613/xdebug.so Be careful about that number part in the path as it could be different for you. Now restart apache by issuing following command. sudo apache2ctl restart Now try to view the output of your phpinfo() function. If you find xdebug word in that then it means you have successfully installed xdebug. Stacktrace xdebug.collect_params accepts values fr...

Apache Apache is a free & widely used web server. To install it on your local system execute following command. sudo apt-get -y install apache2 You might get following warning when starting apache web server. apache2: Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.1.1 for ServerName Add following line to /etc/apache2/apache2.conf to slience the warning. ServerName localhost To test the installation enter http://localhost in addressbar of your browser and you should see the message It works! . Visit Apache HTTP Server site. PHP PHP is one of the most easiest scripting language available for quickly writing backend code. Install php by executing following command. sudo apt-get -y install php5 libapache2-mod-php5 By default you will not be able to save anything to /var/www. To make /var/www writable execute following command. sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www/ To test php installation enter following snippet into /var/www/he...