Is your Nautilus slow to open directories?

Fix Naultilus slow loading some directories.

If nautilus is taking an age to load some directories on your computer then you may have Assistive Technologies enabled.

Simply go to the System menu on your desktop and then in Preferences. Click on Assistive Technologies.Untick the box marked "Enable Assistive Technologies" and choose "Close and Log Out" at the bottom of the window.

When you log back in Nautilus should be opening directories instantly again. Apparently this became an issue in 8.10 when Assistive technologies was enabled by default, I only spent aoround 8 months suffering with this before getting off my backside and finding a fix, it is disappointing that there has not been a direct update to sort this out, there must be a lot of people stuck with this problem.

Disable IPV6 on Ubuntu 8.10

Disable IPV6 on Ubuntu.

Some people feel loading IPV6 can improve the network performance and if your ISP doesn't support IPV6 yet (which most do not) then it will do no harm to disable it.

sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklistappend the following line:blacklist ipv6

Save the file and restart your machine!You can verify that ipv6 is actually disabled using the following command:

ip a | grep inet6

If you see no ouput then IPV6 is now disabled.

XFCE4 Automatic desktop wallpaper changer.

I recently started using XFCE on my Aspire One. I've always liked XFCE and alternated it with Gnome just for variety. Anyway using XFCE full time made me wish for a method to change the wallpaper every X number of minutes so after some hunting and poking this was the solution for automatic wallpaper changing.

First step is to define a list of wallpapers to use in the normal Desktop settings configuration, I'm notgoing to explain in detail how to do it, its fairly straight forward so go explore.

With that configured then XFCE will load a random wallpaper on each login, very nice but not quite what we want is it.

Well it turns out the solution is simply to reload the desktop on a timed interval. Cron takes care of the timed interval part, and the comand to call is:

export DISPLAY=:0; /usr/bin/xfdesktop -reload

You can try it in a terminal before putting it into a cron job. In case you aren[t familiar with cron it is just a case of doing:

crontab -e

If it is the first time you called it then it may ask you what editor to use, just use nano if available as its the easiest to use imho.

Enter this line into the editor:

0,15,30,45 * * * * export DISPLAY=:0; /usr/bin/xfdesktop -reload


Thank you to Ninjanoh who suggested in the comments that this will work in 11.10 by changing -reload into --reload




Ctrl + o to save the file, then Ctrl + x to exit nano.

The wallpaper should now change on the hour and at 15 minutes, 30 minutes and 45 minutes past the hour.

Update to the latest Compiz Fusion On Ubuntu Hardy

You will need to add a new repository that contains recent Compiz packages. Open System->Administration->Software Sources. Select the Third-Party Software tab and click Add. Paste in the line below and click Add Source.

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/compiz/ubuntu hardy main

Close Software Sources and when prompted, choose to reload the repositories.

A number of software updates related to Compiz should become available now; install them using Update Manager. Log out and back in to Ubuntu or restart Compiz manually. You should now be up-to-date.

A nice new window shifter is available for the new Compiz called StackSwitch, just install it from the repo and disable the normal Shift Switcher. It would be nice if the author will add selecting the windows by the mouse much like Expo or some other window plugins.

Convert BIN/CUE Images to ISO

Convert bin/cue into ISO

Installation

sudo apt-get install bchunk

Usage As the name implies, a BIN/CUE CD image has two files. BIN being a binary of the raw CD data, and CUE being an ASCII file of CD layout.General usage:

bchunk image.bin image.cue basename

For example:

bchunk myimage.bin myimage.cue myimage

Where basename(myimage) is myimage.iso of the produced file.

Error trying to mount an external device: mount_point cannot contain the following characters: newline, G_DIR_SEPARATOR (usually /)

The computer fails to mount a device with the following error:

Cannot mount volume.Unable to mount the volume 'yourdevicenamehere'.Detailsmount_point cannot contain the following characters: newline, G_DIR_SEPARATOR (usually /)

This can be from incorrectly setting the mount point by right clicking the drive and choosing Properties then the Drive tab and finally expanding the section for Settings, this should simply contain the name you would like the device to be named on your desktop and NOT a fully qualified pathname such as /media/freecom

If you have incorrectly set this or some other bad voodoo has happened to result in this error then it can at least in some cases be very quickly fixed with the following. Open a terminal and open the Gnome Configuration Editor with this command:

gconf-editor

and navigate to this location in the left hand menu:

system / storage / drives /

If you can now see an entry relating to the problem drive then click it and edit its entry on the right, removing the path and any /'s is normally sufficient , all it should be is a simple name that you would prefer it appear on the desktop as, in my case I was changing a drive that mounted as /media/FREECOM HDD to mount as /media/FREECOMHDD due to X-Plane not liking paths with spaces in. So the correct entry for mine was to just input "FREECOMHDD" with no path, no /'s and no speechmarks! ;)

Recover Photographs From a Memory Card

Recover images off a corrupt/damaged memory card. The first step to do is to install a software package named “testdisk”. sudo apt-get install testdisk Or of course use synaptic to search for "testdisk" and install it. The next step is to make an image of your memory card, this is achieved using the ‘dd’ command which comes by default with most distributions, the command you will have to issue is: dd if=/dev/sda1 of=memory_card.img bs=1024 You can get the correct /dev/xxxx path by inserting the memory card then using "dmesg" in a terminal and reading the last few lines. In the above command, ‘if’ is the input drive which should be your memory card, ‘of’ is the file name for the image which we are creating, and ‘bs’ is the byte size. Recover files by scanning the image using photorec The final step is to use a command provided by testdisk package. The ‘photorec’ command will recover all the JPG and GIF files which were recently deleted from your memory card. The command is very simple and run from the folder containing the image file: photorec memory_card.img The software will take you through a menu driven interface where you will have to select a few options to get your work done. It is simple and anyone should be able to use it with ease.

Do more with Gnome Do

Do more with Gnome Do.

I just discovered this launcher a few days ago and was instantly impressed after viewing the demonstration video available via the homepage. It provides some of the most powerful features of a launcher I have ever seen with massive potential for speeding up *real* productivity in ways you won't have considered.

First you need to edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

Then add the following lines:

For Hardy Users
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/do-core/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/do-core/ubuntu hardy main

For Gutsy Users
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/do-core/ubuntu gutsy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/do-core/ubuntu gutsy main

Save and exit the file.

Update the source list file using the following command

sudo aptitude update

Install gnome-do using the following command from terminal

sudo aptitude install gnome-do

If you want to open gnome-do go to Applications—>Accessories—>GNOME Do

You can then open its preferences from the system tray and tick the first check box called "Start GNOME Do at login" so that it will launch when you reboot rather than remembering to do so from the menu.You can then choose the "Plug-ins" tab in the preferences to install any plug-ins that you feel would be useful to you, some I find very useful, Evolution, Files and Folders, Gnome Terminal, Locate Files, Tomboy and Tasque. Others would be more dependant on your computer uses and software such as Gmail Contacts, Imageshack, SSH, Rhythmbox etc

To call up Gnome Do just tap the Super+space key combo, that is windows key + space in other words. For further information it is well worth checking out the homepage and for help with plugins it can be helpful to open the preferences and click the About box for a plugin, you will be taken to its own wiki page that often has details on its use.

Bash script to act as a thesaurus

I just stumbled across this excellent post at The Linux and Unix Menagerie which lists a brilliant little script to add a thesaurus command to your shell, this just perfectly rounds off my recent discovery of the dictionary word lookup commands!

This script is very small, in fact surprisingly so. Just be careful copying it into your text editor as the formatting isn't 100% and needs some tweaking, nothing major and no one should have any problems (yeah I know, fatal last words ;))

Linux Pocket Guide by O Reilly

This is a command reference that I have been using for several months now (check your plug-ins if you can't see the image above) that I got off Amazon and it has really earned its keep. using 'man' in the terminal is an excellent source off information if you already know the command but sometimes you just don't know it or even know the facility existed. Don't worry about the "Covers Fedora Linux" if you don't use Fedora, the commands are generic that I have found and nothing has failed to work on my Ubuntu box that I have tried.

Linux Pocket Guideis fantastic as you can just dip into it for clarification on a command syntax for a quick solution (there are many examples on most commands, or you can just read through it as I did when it first arrived, discovering several commands I had no idea were possible. I didn't know for there were dictionary's lookup commands available at the command line (look, aspell, spell) for checking spellings for instance. Try the following as an example of it:

look big

Its extremely useful and helps with checking words on a variety of projects, including this blog. Check out the book, its inexpensive and pocket sized, perfect for taking with you on the odd trip to dip into and refresh, it gets my unreserved approval.