ubuntu snippets

There is an easy command line way to add PPA repository and fetch GPG keys automatically. sudo add-apt-repository ppa:<repository-name> Replace repository name with relavent PPA repository. For example if you want to add and setup gpg keys for kubuntu-experimental execute following command. sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kubuntu-experimental

F.lux allows you to auto adjust lightening of you monitor to ease strain on your eyes. Download Linux version of F.lux . Usage xflux {-L <Latitue> | -z <zipcode>} Source: F.lux

I am not really a fan of media center software but I wanted to organize all of my media in one location and play them as I pleased. I installed elisa as I once tried beta version of it with it's impressive user interface animation capabilities. Weird but I don't see Elisa entry any where in Ubuntu menu. Package info showed it only contains documentation files and README revealed some off-world creature called moovida. The fun starts Started moovida and it showed some vertical areas divided into movies, videos, music, etc. Now all I have to do is add my USB drive to moovida so that it will show some play lists but I couldn't find any option. Instead it scanned some random locations and added some random videos to "Unclassified Videos" in Videos section and I throughly verified whether they are by mistake "Area-51 alien interrogation videos". I couldn't find any option that said add a folder or add file or anything that remotely implied "impo

Execute following command before running eclipse. This bug affects wizards, button clicks, etc... export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1

To this date installing apt-cacher-ng is the most simple way to setup apt proxy in ubuntu. Install apt-cacher-ng sudo apt-get -y install apt-cacher-ng Lets call the system which has apt-cacher-ng as server and other systems that are going to use this cache as client. After installing the apt-cacher-ng on the server you have to make sure server it self uses this apt-proxy. You can do this by creating a file called /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/01proxy and enter following line and save the file. Acquire::http { Proxy "http://127.0.0.1:3142"; }; Now open terminal in client systems and create the same /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/01proxy file and enter the following code and save the file. Acquire::http { Proxy "http://<server ip address>:3142"; }; Replace "&lt server ip address &gt" with real server ip address. That's it all your apt fetch and updates will go through your apt proxy and you will save tons of bandwidth if you have multiple

nethogs allows you to see which application is consuming your network bandwidth. It has conventional interface like top command so lot of details about each process is displayed in tabular format. nethogs is available in ubuntu universe so no need of adding extra repo lines. Install nethogs sudo apt-get -y install nethogs Usage sudo nethogs <network interface name for eg: eth1>

SmarterFox learns site pagination systems and allows you to view other pages without even a single click. These are the features offered by SmarterFox. SmarterFox makes your address bar smarter by integrating Google search with awesome bar(address bar). Save flash based content. There is a quick launcher which allows you to open your favorite sites. Search selected text in Google, Wikipedia and other sites.

There is a plugin called vigedit which provides vi emulation for gedit. First execute following command to checkout the source from bazaar repo. bzr branch http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~tristil/vigedit/main-method Now go inside main-method folder and execute following command. python install.py Now open your gedit and goto Edit > Preferences > Plugins and check vigedit. Your gedit will turn into basic vi editor.

Nokia started working on providing official python bindings for QT after talks with PyQt creators riverbank failed. The new API is called PySide and it's available under LGPL license and going to maintain API compatibility with PyQt thus ensuing porting of existing PyQt applications with minimal or no changes. Nokia is going to provide pyside as an alternative option to develop mobile applications for next Maemeo 5 devices. Get pyside

Add following two lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list . deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-ppa/backports/ubuntu jaunty main deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-ppa/staging/ubuntu jaunty main Execute following command to setup GPG keys and to update your apt package meta data. sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 8AC93F7A sudo apt-get update If you already have previous version of KDE execute following command. sudo apt-get -y dist-upgrade If you don't have any KDE version already installed then execute following command. sudo apt-get -y install kubuntu-desktop

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Unknown Horizons is a RTS game focused on building your city and its economy, commerce. Install Unknown Horizon Add following source to your /etc/apt/sources.list file. deb http://deb.unknown-horizons.org/ release main Install GPG keys of the repo to confirm package authenticity. wget http://deb.unknown-horizons.org/key && sudo apt-key add key Now update your apt cache to fetch info about new packages and install Unknwn Horizons game. sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get -y install unknown-horizons

We are seeing an invasion of netbook offerings from lot of vendors Acer,dell,hp,Intel, the list goes on with the impressive battery backup times. But everything boils down to either Intel atom processor with Intel chip set or ARM processor package. State of Intel offerings Many of Intel partners are competing against Intel using Intels own hardware. So to neutralize this threat and to make Intel offerings look much more attractive Intel is supplying hardware locked at lower frequency to its partners. If you own an Atom based netbook with Intel hardware you may try GMABooster to remove these limitations. Get GMABooster State of Intel graphics Every chip-set of Intel works well on Linux except chip-sets that use PowerVR based graphics acceleration. Since PowerVR doesn't have any track record of releasing open source video drivers, GMA 500 has very primitive driver support in Linux. These are the things that I am able to uncover about Intels offering of netbooks. If you

stacklet.com is providing virtual disk images of most popular distros and also offering kernel packages with Xen support. Download them here. http://stacklet.com/

There is a new video editor called PiTiVi on ubuntu PPA repositories. It uses newer gstreamer packages with bug fixes. Installation Add following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list file. deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/gstreamer-developers/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/gstreamer-developers/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main Execute following command to install gpg keys. sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 688F8FE67057C366AFA97270C0B56813051D8B58 Now do an apt-get and install PiTiVi package. sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get -y install pitivi Features offered by PiTiVi Multilayer support. Trimming/Cutting , Ripple/Roll, Slip/Slide support. API for writing extensions. PiTiVi features Launchpad page for PiTiVi

ProFTPd ProFTPd is one the easiest ftp server to install and configure. Use following command to install ProFTPd server. sudo apt-get -y install proftpd Now open /etc/proftpd.conf file and change root to something like below. DefaultRoot ~/ftp Above configuration option tells ProFTPd to use ftp folder in your home for storage purpose. So don't forget to create the folder. Now restart ProFTPd using following command. sudo /etc/init.d/proftpd restart Now your Ubuntu FTP server is ready. vsftpd vsftpd is another ftp server which is available right out of Ubuntu repositories. Install vsftpd using following command. sudo apt-get -y install vsftpd vsftpd has numerous number of configuration options available and you can use these options to control every aspect of your ftp server. You can modify /etc/vsftpd.conf to change behavior of your ftp server. Learn more about vsftpd server configuration options.

Latest version of Ubuntu comes up with the handy shortcut to restart xserver using keyboard. Here is a way to enable that option. First install dontzap package. sudo apt-get -y install dontzap Now add following three lines to /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. Section “ServerFlags” Option “DontZap” “false” EndSection After restarting Ubuntu you can use Control+Alt+Backspace keyboard option.

QT is officially available under LGPL and as promised Nokia opened up their repositories to outside people. You can now checkout QT code using git. Use following git command to get QT code. git clone git://gitorious.org/qt/qt.git Official QT git repository.

Firefox 3.6 beta 4 is in testing phase and it makes browsing a breeze. The following are the advantages of using latest Firefox. Has native JSON support/web worker threads. TraceMonkey JavaScript engine. Private Mode Browsing (aka Porn Mode). Support for animation in XUL toolkit. Better integration of web standards. Many stability & security bug fixes. Download & Install Firefox 3.6 sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa Now update your repositories and install Firefox 3.6. sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get -y install firefox-3.6 Now start Firefox using the command firefox-3.6

emacs starter kit comes up with beginner friendly defaults and makes emacs learning much pain less. It sets some good default settings to get started. Get emacs starter kit Use following command to start downloading emacs starter kit. git clone git://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit.git Now start emacs using emacs starter kit. emacs -q -l ./emacs-starter-kit/init.el

Hardinfo allows you to benchmark and get system information. Following types of benchmarks are performed to access the system performance. ZLib Fibonacci MD5 SHA1 Blowfish FPU Raytracing These benchmarks doesn't cover all aspects of the system but it's nice to start somewhere. Hardinfo also collects the following info and generates the html report. Operating System Info File system Info Network Info Hardware info (Processor, Memory, PCI, USB, Printers, Sensors, etc...) Install hardinfo sudo apt-get -y install hardinfo

Moonlight This is Linux port of Microsoft sliverlight apparently designed to compete with adobe flash. Silver light doesn't offer anything new that's not already offered by adobe flash. Linux distros previously included some of the technologies that were controversial because they were widespread and to make interoperability easy for new users. We don't need this turd and it's not widespread. Mono Here comes another patent covered piece of junk aggressively pushed by Novell. Apparently some parts of win forms are covered by patents and could give ground for Microsoft to spread their FUD further. Some of the applications using Mono. F-Spot - An excellent photo management application written using propaganda software. Beagle - A desktop file search tool. Tomboy - A gnome note taking application. And many more... If you want to see Linux survive and not polluted by Microsoft's litter either use pure OSS counterparts of these software or prefer ap

Tried normal GUI upgrade using upgrade-manager -d command. I was told I need to download around 1.5G to complete upgrade. I wasn't surprised since I have 10s of window managers and other apps installed which I play around with. First thing I did was uninstall everything GUI based and bring down the system to bare bones. I did achieve this by uninstalling kdebase, libgtk, openoffice and games etc. And did apt-get autoremove to remove unnecessary packages. Since I don't have any window manager installed I had to do everything from virtual terminal. I used following command to do upgrade from CLI. us.archive.ubuntu.com was incredibly slow for me and I had to use tw.archive.ubuntu.com . Took me around 3hrs on 512kbps connection. sudo do-release-upgrade -d After completion of system upgrade installed default GNOME environment. sudo apt-get -y install ubuntu-desktop Surprises Finally ath5k started supporting my atheros wireless chipset . nVidia driver was automatical

iotop allows us to watch processes which are currently accessing the disks. iotop also shows I/O transfer speeds by process and thus it becomes easy to pinpoint what's going on. Installation Use following command to install iotop . sudo apt-get -y install iotop Now you can use iotop command inside terminal to launch iotop.

nethogs allows you to watch network traffic on the system grouped by process. It tracks both upload and download speeds. Has support for ethernet, PPP and supports both IPv4 and IPv6. Install nethogs Use following command to install nethogs sudo apt-get -y install nethogs

Ever tried using win key( super ,meta) as shortcut in gnome keyboard shortcuts? It will take it as super-key and not modifier. Do the following to use win/super/meta/mod4(different names for same key btw) for shortcuts in gnome. Change Win key behaviour in gnome. Select "Alt/Win key behaviour" by selection doing selecting following actions. Select "Meta is mapped to Left Win" from the list. preferences -> keyboard -> layouts(tab) -> Layout Options(button) -> Alt/Win key behaviour(dropdown list item) Now select "preferences -> keyboard shortcuts " and select the action you want to change and press win+key as you do normally. You will see Mod4+key . And it works now :)

I like gnome terminal except with each tab it consumes more and more memory. Some times I can actually see system slowing down and perceived delays in terminal response. Recently I stumbled on to xfce4 terminal which is similar but takes lot less memory, lightweight and responsive. Install xfce4 terminal Install the package xfce4-terminal sudo apt-get -y install xfce4-terminal Use following command to run the XFCE terminal xfce4-terminal

Chromium is the Linux port of official Google chrome browser for windows. Right now chromium is unstable and only useful for scratching your curiosity itch. Install chromium Add following sources to /etc/apt/sources.list file. For jaunty deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main For intrepid deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main For hardy deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu hardy main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu hardy main Now execute following commands to install chromium. sudo apt-get -y update && sudo apt-get -y --force-yes install chromium-browser

SSHMenu is an gnome panel applet that allows you to configure ssh connections with different presets (colors, etc...). Install SSHMenu Use following command to install sshmenu . sudo apt-get install sshmenu-gnome Now execute following command to restart gnome panel. killall -9 gnome-panel Now right click on any gnome panel and add ssh menu gnome applet.

Multi-touch became trendy after iphone came up with it. We are seeing many new laptops with multi-touch. At hardware level, there is nothing special that you need, to make multi-touch work. You can also do two-finger scroll and two-finger tap to right/middle click. Also, three-finger tap, but, for me it is very hard to press three fingers at the same time(1 out of 10). Create new file gksudo gedit /etc/hal/fdi/policy/11-x11-synaptics.fdi Paste the following code into the file and save it. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <deviceinfo version="0.2"> <device> <match key="info.capabilities" contains="input.touchpad"> <merge key="input.x11_driver" type="string">synaptics</merge> <merge key="input.x11_options.SHMConfig" type="string">On</merge> <merge key="input.x11_options.EmulateTwoFingerMinZ"

A few months back I bought an acer aspire 4520 laptop. Since then I wasn't able to make wifi work on my laptop. For me madwifi doesn't work at all and ndiswrapper works occasionally. Recently I went out bought Netgear USB wifi stick and it worked out of box. No need to install any drivers or anything. Hope jaunty will have proper support for atheros chip sets.

Vega strike is a space simulation game with numerous mods. It has support for multi player gaming. Use following command to install vegastrike package. sudo apt-get -y install vegastrike You can visit vegastrike wiki for further info on both playing and developing the game. Vegastrike wiki

xbel stands for XML Bookmark Exchange Language and .recently-used.xbel file contains list of recently opened files. This file is opened and parsed every time you open a file inside GTK application like eog (Eye of Gnome Image Viewer). This file could grow larger (some times megabytes) and affect the responsiveness of the GTK application. I don't know why GTK team chose XML format rather than something like SQLite which offers faster retrieval and lookup of entries. Assumptions aside lets disable this fracking thing and make your GTK applications much more responsive. Disable .recently-used.xbel You should have either .gtkrc or .gtkrc-2.0 in your home directory if not create a new file and add following line to it. gtk-recent-files-max-age=0 Now restart your gnome environment for faster desktop environment.

mtop allows you to monitor your MySQL instance in real-time. It shows you uptime of the instance, number of queries executed per second, slow queries, number active threads, etc. Installation sudo apt-get -y install mtop Use following command to watch your MySQL server stats with 1 second refresh interval. mtop -se 1

Add following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/saispo/ubuntu/ intrepid main Do an update and apt-get awesome to install or to upgrade. sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get -y install awesome You will get latest version of awesome window manager that is far more newer than the one in official repo.

Installaing KDE 4.2 Add following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list file. deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-experimental/ubuntu intrepid main Execute following command to install gpg key. gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 493B3065 && gpg --export -a 493B3065 | sudo apt-key add - Now do an apt update sudo apt-get update Now you can upgrade your existing kde installation using following command. sudo apt-get -y dist-upgrade I started using KDE 4.2 and it's pretty usable. It has polished interface and many GUI glitches are fixed.

World Of Goo by 2D Boy has been released for Linux. World Of Goo is a physics based puzzle game and offers countless hours of fun. Previously we are able to run World Of Goo on wine with out any problem but It's good to see native port of this popular game. Get World Of Goo for Ubuntu Linux

There are many Linux distributions and many package formats. Some times your favorite program is only available in one package format when you need it in another format. That's where alien makes your life easy by allowing you to install foreign packages on your favorite distribution. Install alien Use following command to install alien package on your system. sudo apt-get -y install alien Using alien Assuming you have an rpm package named hello.rpm , you can install this package using following command. sudo alien -iv hello.rpm That's it you favorite program is installed on your system.

Medibuntu is the place where you can get proprietary codecs for playing those unplayable media files in Ubuntu. Setup repositories Assuming you are using jaunty execute following command. sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/jaunty.list --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list If you are into intrepid use following command. sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/intrepid.list --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list Now install key and update your cache. sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get update Make every DVD playable. Following command will allows your Ubuntu system to access discs protected using region codes. sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2 Make every exotic media file playable If you are using 32bit os then use following command. This will install w32codecs . sudo apt-get install w32codecs If you are on 64 bit system then use following command. Thi

BluePad allows you to remote control movie and music players on your PC from your Cell Phone. These are the some of the features offered by remote pad. Simulate game pad. Remote control presentations Customizable key mapping. Available in half a dozen languages. Get Blue Pad for Ubuntu

Use following two commands to enable "Print to PDF" functionality in Ubuntu if it's not already enabled. mdkir ~/PDF/ sudo apt-get -y install cups-pdf

UUID's were introduced to identify disk partitions uniquely. And these UUID will remain same even when device order changes and becomes easy for mounting and unmounting these partitions without any concerns. Currently there are two ways to get UUIDs of partitions. blkid ls /dev/disk/by-uuid

Installation Download windows full version and Linux client zip files from download page. Extract full version zip file and extract Linux client into previously extracted directory. Set execute permissions for Linux binary and you are ready to play the game. Download Counter Strike 2D

Installation sudo apt-get -y install wmii Usage Restart your current GUI session and select wmii from your login manager. You will be presented with a blank screen, now press Mod+Enter to start a new terminal. Following are the useful keyboard shortcuts. Mod+Enter - Start a new terminal Mod+M, Mod+S, Mod+D - Maximized layout, Stacked layout, Reset to default layout(equal height). Mod+H, Mod+L, Mod+J, Mod+K - Move focus to left, right, down, up window. Mod+Shift+H, Mod+Shift+L, Mod+Shift+J, Mod+Shift+K - Move current window to left, right, down, up. Move to left or right keys will result in new column if there is no column exists in that direction. Mod+P - Shows an application launcher. Customization wmii is glued together using bash scripts so its easy to customize. wmii exposes its settings as a virtual file system and you can modify settings using wmiir command.

"Linux is great. It's a free, open-source operating system (OS) based on work done by Linus Torvalds in the early '90s. Again, it's free, powerful and easy to ... Oh wait, it's a pain to use." read more | digg story

History is in the making because for the first time ever Red Hat is about to go beyond Sun Micro systems in terms of market capitalization. read more | digg story

Commander Stalin is based on BOSWARS and it's a RTS game. The most impressive thing about this game is clean graphics. Get Commander Stalin

This is the community to share and view the configuration files. This site has some pretty impressive collection of configuration files ranging from bash to emacs. You can certainly learn some techniques by examining these configuration files. dotfiles.org

This sexy desktop mod was initially designed for windows but it's now ported to Linux. Give it a try. Download Enigma Desktop & Get Installation Instructions.

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The embattled SCO Group Inc. is proposing to auction off its core products and use proceeds to continue its controversial lawsuits over the alleged violations of its copyrights in Linux open-source software. read more | digg story

Surely, I am an advocate of Dell (and system76.com, and now HP for mobile mi(it's Ubuntu)) because of their GUTS to sell GNU/Linux to end users! That being said, I wanted for people to see this story to raise awareness. Regular people are getting pushed around, being discouraged from choice, and soldiers of freedom MUST ANSWER! BRING IT ON!! read more | digg story

this is the update to the earlier post about the girl that was so close to becoming a rocket scientist that she had to drop out of school because her laptop had Ubuntu on it. Now the problem is now all us Linux users out here that are just haters, make your own call on this. read more | digg story

* Freedesktop.org-compliant startup notifications. * Many fixes for 64-bit application support. * Improved graphics support in Internet Explorer. * Various Richedit improvements. * Better certificate manager dialog. * Various bug fixes. read more | digg story

The KDE project has announced the availability of the KDE 4.2 release candidate. This release is not intended for use in production environments, but it is suitable for testers who want to get an early look at the new features and help track down some of the remaining bugs. read more | digg story

"First off, let's dispel a couple of things. I have sat in meetings with principals and school administrators and listened slack-jawed as system administrators (mostly MSCE's) told their employers that it was illegal to remove Windows from their current computers. They didn't say it violated their contracts or licenses...they said it was illegal." read more | digg story

Ars takes a close look at Seed, a new framework that allows software developers to build GTK+ applications with JavaScript. The popular web scripting language could soon become the dominant application extension language on the Linux desktop. read more | digg story

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Blender Gamekit 1st Edition is available for free of cost. It includes a book and a CDROM for learning everything from texturing to animation. Download Blender Gamekit 1st Edition For Free

Installation sudo apt-get -y install hamster-applet Add this applet to one of your gnome dock panel and start using it.

Want to run Ubuntu on Amazon EC2 ?, Here is a site that provides base images of both Debian & Ubuntu for running on Amazon EC2. Ubuntu/Debian Images for Amazon EC2

The first step in achieving clutter free desktop area is "Hiding icons on desktop". Gnome provides a way to do that. First open up gconf-editor (Gnome Configuration Editor) by executing following command. gconf-editor Now navigate to /apps/nautilus/preferences and uncheck the tick mark on the option show desktop . As soon as you uncheck the option show desktop icons on your desktop will instantly disappear.

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This is one of the best multi player game I have played recently. Maps, weapons and number of online servers available is just wonderful. Go and play this game you won't regret it. Installation sudo apt-get -y install teeworlds Remember that left click is for action & right click is for shooting hook.

Build vast cities sometimes 64 times larger than original game. Game play spans from 1950 to 2050 and objective of this game is to build roads, transport system, etc... and attract as many passengers as possible. Enjoy the game. Get OpenTTD

Savage 2: A Tortured Soul was completely free from Dec 28th 2008. You can download it and play it on your system for free. Game play includes elements of FPS & RTS. Download Savage 2: A Tortured Soul for Linux

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sauerbraten is a free first person shooter game. This is redesign of famous Cube FPS game. Installation sudo apt-get -y install sauerbraten sauerbraten seems to have lower fps with nivida cards, you can speed up the game by passing the option -f to the executable. This effectively disables shaders and makes the game responsive. If you have any problem or trick you want to share comment to this post.

galcon is one of the commercial game designed and produced using pygame. This proves you can make money using open source tools. Galcon has high engaging game play that keeps you playing the game for hours. You can freely download it and buy it if you like it. Get galcon

numpty is a physics puzzle game. And it will surely entertain you. Goal of this game is to making sure red ball hits yellow star with in the constraints of physics. Download 32bit deb Download 64bit deb Get Extra Levels

There are numerous archive types tar.bz, tar.bz2, zip, rar, etc... And most of the time it is impossible to remember every conceivable option out there. By using a tool like atool you just have to remember things specific to atool and let the atool handle remaining details. aunpack - To extract files from an archive. apack - To create an archive. als - To list files in an archive. acat - To extract contents to standard output. adiff - To display differences between two archives. arepack - To convert an archive from one format to another. Installation sudo apt-get -y install atool