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Showing posts from July, 2008

Wine Doors - Install Windows Applications

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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

Start Menu for Ubuntu

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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.

Remove Residual Packages

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.

Compile Firefox from Scratch

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 distributions

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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

Upgrade to Newer Release

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.

Easy network traffic shaping on your ubuntu system

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 - Website Monitor for Ubuntu

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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.

Theme Applications Launched with sudo

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.

Jerky Firefox Scroll ?, Try Disabling Pango

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

Automatic installation of nvidia & ati proprietary graphics drivers

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

Enable Spell Check for Text Fields in Firefox

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.