Howto: Bind Keys In Nautilus To Scripts Or Other Menu Items.

I picked up this excellent tip from Webupd8.

First you should have installed Nautilus Open Terminal for an initial very useful shortcut. It adds a menu entry on the right click and in the File menu to do exactly what it says, open a terminal at the current folder you have open in the active Nautilus window. So enter the following into a terminal.

sudo apt-get install nautilus-open-terminal

If it is already installed it will just inform you of it in the text it spews, otherwise it will install it, and inform you of that too.

Open up gconf-editor from a terminal or Alt+F2 (you may also have it listed in your Applications/System Tools/ menu as Configuration Editor. Be a little bit careful in here, there is possibility of breaking stuff. Navigate in the left hand pane to Desktop/Gnome/Interface.

Change the toggle for "can_change_accels" to true/enabled. Leave the gconf-editor window open as you most likely want to disable it again after setting the keybindings you want. Be aware that you can only bind to the main Nautilus menu and not to its right click menu.

Press Alt+F2 and enter "nautilus -q" to restart Nautilus, then you may set any menu item or script to have a key bind simply by opening the Nautilus main menu and then pressing the key bind that would like to set it as while hovering over the item. For instance I hovered over Open Terminal and I have set to F4, I have also added bindings to other scripts I use fairly frequently.

I would suggest disabling the "can_change_accels" to false again to prevent accidental overwriting of key bindings, thats entirely up to you though, and be aware of what key binds you set of course, binding ctrl+c to close/quit nautilus is going to cause problems ;)

Howto: Stop Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Mounting USB Devices With UUID Instead of a Name

Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala changed the way USB devices get mounted a little bit. Instead of being mounted as /media/disk and then each other device becoming /media/disk-1, disk-2 and so forth, now the device is mounted with its UUID, a seemingly random string.

I never minded the disk-1, disk2 thing, though it was slightly annoying to not know which device was which sometimes it was seldom a problem as I had frequently just plugged it in and watched it mount. So the new change was a bt more of an annoyance as its harder to see which random string just appeared sometimes.

The solution as ever is pretty darned simple however, just label the device you lazy bum ;)

Pop along to the following page and read how to label different partition types, most likely fat16/32 or NTFS for your average thumbdrive of phone/mp3 player mounted as a mass storage.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RenameUSBDrive

Personally I use the Gparted method as mtools has an issue which means you have to add the device to a config file first (its detailed on the page) and while its not hard, its just an extra step I don't need.

So if you don't have Gparted installed already do the following or use Synaptic:

sudo apt-get install gparted

Start Gparted from the System/Administration menu, then select your device from the drop down list in the top right then unmount it by right clicking it in the lower frame and choose unmount. This is so you can make changes to it. Choose to "label" it from the same right click menu or from the Partition menu, finally you have to apply the changes by clicking the right most icon on the toolbar to "Apply all changes". It is done instantly and no longer will that device be known as /media/4169-87bb.

Howto: Automatically reboot on Kernel Panic.

While on holiday I was unable to SSH into my home PC one morning, worrying slightly about what might have happened as the machine is normally rock solid stable I called home to my parents who live very close and asked my mother when she went around to reboot the machine (assuming the house was ok and hadn't burnt down or been burgled)

She called me back up, the lights on the keyboard were flashing and she wasn't sure what to do as there was nothing on the screen when she turned it on, I explained how to hard reset the box (I wasn't going into Raising Skinny Elephants Is Utterly Boring with her), the machine rebooted ok.

After thanking her I logged in and did the tasks I needed to do and then spoke with a friend about it, he made a suggestion I had not known about. The computer could be configured to automatically reboot next time it Kernel paniced. No need to ask my mother to go and reboot it :]

Simply add the following line to /etc/sysctl.conf

kernel.panic = 60

After 60 seconds the computer will automatically reboot itself. Then you need to find out why it paniced and fix it.

Make Pasword file Immutable - A Security tip

You can add a extra layer of protection to your machine, or in my case help to prevent wannabe haxx0r brothers at the parents house from changing to extremely short passwords with a little trick that not many are aware of.

What happened to me was my brother managed to shoulder surf the admin account on my parents PC, I normally update their PC by SSH from home, but I was around there visiting and mum had described a problem so I was fixing it while we chatted, my brother was lurking around and managed to shoulder read my 12 digit alpha numeric password (have to give the guy a bit of credit there, sadly)

Anyway I became aware that files on the admin account had incorrect accessed times afterwards and then looked deeper and found that someone had been in on the account and had changed my brothers password on his account from a sensible 10 digit alphanumeric (which was dead simple to bang in with two fingers as the digits were paired on the keyboard) into a rather less safe two letter password. He claimed that a friend had helped him break into my account as "you aren't the only one that knows linux", as if I ever imagined that I was some guru, I'm a self confessed learner still! As we "discussed" this further he came clean that he had simply watched me enter the password rather than "hacked" in.

Anyway lets get onto the crux of this, after setting your passwords open a terminal and enter:
chattr +i /etc/shadow

This will make the file immutable, which means that it cannot be deleted or renamed, no symlink can be made to this file and no data can be written to the file. The immutable flag must be cleared before passwords can be changed, if you try to do so without clearing it then it will appear to change the password, but in fact it would not write to the file, without error. Meaning the new password would never be written and the old password would continue being the active one.

If a fairly knowledgeable user tries to dig into why it won't write and they try:
$ ls -l /etc/shadow
-rw-r----- 1 root shadow 1027 2009-08-25 14:37 shadow

There is nothing obviously wrong with writing to the file, to check properly you would use:
$ sudo lsattr shadow
----i------------- shadow

Here we can see the +i flag set for immutable. If we clear that with:
chattr -i /etc/shadow
The password can now be changed as normal, using sudo passwd username
and then it can be set +i again to protect it.

A little bit sneaky and just a little bit safer.

Enable Composite Manager in Metacity

Not every computer has the resources to run Compiz, but if you pine after some nice effects like window shadows then there is a good chance your computer is capable of running simpler effects. i use this on my Acer Aspire One, sure it can manage Compiz, but it is a little overkill on the baby netbook.

Well rejoice now as Metacity has a composite manager built in which can give you nice drop shadows as well as a window preview on alt+tab and that  pesky inactive window title-bar transparency (which I detailed how to disable last post).

Enable the composite manager in gconf-editor and navigate to the branch in apps/metacity/general

Tick the box next to the setting composite_manager and you are now hopefully enjoying drop shadows... Yay!

A quick alternative is to paste this into a terminal

gconftool-2 -s '/apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager' --type bool true

and if you need to disable it again use:

gconftool-2 -s '/apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager' --type bool false

Adjust Titlebar Transparency in Metacity

I might be in the minority with this sentiment but I really dislike the transparency Gnome has gained on its inactive window titles when using the GTK window decorator. So here is how to make inactive windows have a solid title-bar or if you are are fan of it, make it even more transparent.

Press alt+F2 and in the run dialog enter:

gconf-editor

Navigate in the left hand tree to the branch /apps/gwd/

The two values we are interested in are :

metacity_theme_opacity which affects inactive window titlebars
metacity_theme_active_opacity which affects active windows

A setting of 1 will make the title-bars solid while 0.75 is the default at three quarters opacity.

How to use OTF fonts in Ubuntu

It isn't possible to use OTF fonts directly in Ubuntu without converting them into TTF's.

If we spend just a few minutes and install FontForge and make a very small script it becomes almost trivial to do.

sudo apt-get install fontforge

Now we should make the scripts, well it is two actually but one is a small config script for FontForge and the other is just a script to convert many OTF files in one go, rather than individually. First the FontForge settings file.

cd ~/bin
touch otf2ttf.conf

Then open otf2ttf.conf in your favourite text editor and paste the following into it.

#!/usr/local/bin/fontforge
# Quick and dirty hack: converts a font to truetype (.ttf)
Print("Opening "+$1);
Open($1);
Print("Saving "+$1:r+".ttf");
Generate($1:r+".ttf");
Quit(0);

Save the file, and now lets make the script to convert many fonts in one swoop.

cd ~/bin
touch otf2ttf
chmod +x otf2ttf

Again, open this file with your prefered text editor and paste the following in.

#!/bin/bash
#
# had to enable extglob
shopt -s extglob

# this uses globbing to match fiels ending in otf/OTF
for i in +(*.otf|*.OTF)

do fontforge -script /home/subbass/bin/otf2ttf.conf $i

done

To use this now (provided that your ~/bin folder is in your path) just open a terminal where your OTF files are, and issue the command otf2ttf. It will convert 20 files in just a couple of seconds to give you an idea of speed, you can then move all the resulting TTF files into ~/.fonts


Credit to http://www.stuermer.ch/blog/convert-otf-to-ttf-font-on-ubuntu.html where I found the script before re-typing the instructions. I put it here so I don't lose it next time I need it.

Howto make autohide panels smaller and hidden more in Gnome

Autohide panels in Gnome default to a 6 pixel strip remaining showing. I suspect this is done to "reduce confusion" which is a popular phrase from the Gnome guys, regardless its a little annoying to autohide a panel and still have it show around 20% of itself, so lets fix that.

The easiest way to do this is pop open a terminal and enter:

gconf-editor

This is quite a daunting program if you are fairly new to dabbling in the guts of OS's, and I must warn you to be a little careful in here, certainly don't go just changing stuff around to "see what happens"... Ok, no-one is that dumb... right?

Anyway, down the left hand side is a nice tree menu, navigate to:

/apps/panel/toplevels/

You should then see your panels on the left in the toplevels branch, possibly named bottom_panel_screen0, top_panel_screen0 or simply panel_0, panel_1 etc. Click on each of the panel entries and you will see the right pane populate with some "keys", locate the one auto_hide_size which is very likely set to 6 at the moment, change the 6 to a 1 by clicking on it.

The change is nearly instant and you will hopefully see the relevant autohidden panel sneak a little further offscreen, setting the value to 0 (zero) will not have the desired effect incidently so stick to 1 please.

Delay applications running with sleep from autostart

This is how to cause some programs to wait until they run from the autostart, I will cover both Gnome and Openbox.

First, how to do this in Gnome. Fire up the Session manager either from preferences or via:

gnome-session-properties

Now when you either edit an existing entry, or add a new one the command should be in the following format:

bash -c "sleep 30; gnome-do"

This will make Gnome Do wait 30 seconds before running, obviously you can adjust the 30 and the command to run as your needs dictate. Any changes will be affected when you next login of course.

For Openbox we need to edit ~/.config/openbox/autostart.sh (where ~/ relates to your own home folder, the system will translate it). The file is a simple text format with one command per line, almost all applications in here will want a & (ampersand) after them. The ampersand tells the system to run the command and not wait for it to finish before going to the next, without it Openbox would likely run the first command then stall loading, waiting for it to end before it would even finish loading the desktop.

Ok, the magic to cause the delay....

(sleep 30s && ubuntuone-client-applet) &

Please note the parenthesis, its apparently very important to ensure the command is bracketed like this. Again you may adjust the delay time, and the command (in this case ubuntuone-client-applet)

How to create Debian menu for Openbox

This may also work for other WM like Fluxbox and TWM.

The Debian menu builds a menu from all the installed applications on your system and nicely organises them. I believe it also keeps it updated when you install new software so you do not have to manually add items to your Openbox menu.

To install it use:

sudo aptitude install menu

After it is installed run:

sudo update-menus

To enable the menu in Gnome go to the desktop panel menu:

System / Preferences / Main Menu and enable the Debian menu under Applications.

Set up rxvt terminal with unicode and clickable URL's

Rxvt is a super fast unicode terminal which I have recently switched to away from Eterm for my transparent desktop terminal.

sudo apt-get install rxvt-unicode-ml

Next is to create a configuration file for it in your home folder.

touch .Xdefaults

Now paste this lot in...

URxvt*termName: rxvt

## borderless and no scrollbar
URxvt*scrollBar_right: false
URxvt*scrollBar: false
URxvt*borderLess: false

## teh transparency stuff
URxvt*inheritPixmap: true
URxvt*tintColor: white
URxvt*shading: 100

##
## These 3 lines make links clickable
##
URxvt.urlLauncher: firefox
URxvt.matcher.button: 1
URxvt.perl-ext-common: matcher,readline

## geometry and font
URxvt*geometry: 80×15
URxvt*font: xft:Terminus:pixelsize=12

## change default colors
URxvt*background: #000000
URxvt*foreground: #A8A8A8
URxvt*color0: #000000
URxvt*color1: #A80000

## URxvt*color2: #00A800
URxvt*color2: #ED254F

URxvt*color3: #A85400
## main bars in irssi
URxvt*color4: #020202
URxvt*color5: #A800A8
URxvt*color6: #00A8A8
URxvt*color7: #A8A8A8
URxvt*color8: #545054
URxvt*color9: #F85450

## Time in Irssi
URxvt*color10: #ED254F
## URxvt*color10: #50FC50

## URxvt*color11: #F2FC50
URxvt*color11: #ED254F

URxvt*color12: #5054F8

URxvt*color13: #ED254F
## URxvt*color13: #F854F8

URxvt*color14: #50FCF8
URxvt*color15: #F8FCF8

Note that some of the colours have been changed to coordinate with my current desktop theme, the original colours are commented out so you can easily revert. Also the line defining the window geometry seems to have no effect, I shall look into that and correct it when I get some time and inclination. At the moment I don't mind because the default window size is fine, and the launcher I use to start the transparent terminal I use on the desktop mainly for my screen with irssi, hellanzb and mediatomb in has the geometry set on it. the launcher command is:

rxvt -g 80x15

Last job is to tell compiz to not decorate this window, this will get rid of the title bar, borders and shadow etc.

Hopefully you have installed the advanced compiz settings (ccsm), so just open that up and go to the section for window decorations in Effects, Window Decorations.

Add the rxvt window to be excluded from shadows and decorations, and that should see you done.

Howto: Ubuntu 9.04 notification of available updates revert behaviour

Revert the change in notifications of available updates to original behaviour.

Open a terminal and issue the command:

gconftool -s --type bool /apps/update-notifier/auto_launch false

This will do away with the Update manager automatically opening and revert to showing the update icon instead effectively reverting to original behaviour. The new method seems like a massive regression to me. I don't want to wait 7 days to have the computer randomly open the update manager, and even worse that 7days is reset if you used Synaptic, apt-get or add/remove!

I completely fail to understand why none critical updates should wait 7days before Ubuntu decides that you should install them, and reset the clock if you opened Synaptic in between.

Logitech G9 on Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty

Logitech G9 on Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty


Info taken from : http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1092352

Firstly we need to install a couple of extra programs so open up a terminal and copy/paste the following line:

sudo apt-get install xvkbd xbindkeys

Next up we need to make a ~/.xbindkeysrc and put the next few lines into it:

"/usr/bin/xvkbd -xsendevent -text "\[Alt_L]\[left]""
 b:6
"/usr/bin/xvkbd -xsendevent -text "\[Alt_L]\[right]""
 b:7
"/usr/X11R6/bin/xvkbd -xsendevent -text "\[Control_L]\[Page_Up]""
 m:0x0 + b:11
"/usr/X11R6/bin/xvkbd -xsendevent -text "\[Control_L]\[Page_Down]""
 m:0x0 + b:12

Then make another file called ~/.Xmodmap which contains the single line:

pointer = 1 2 3 4 5 8 9 6 7

Then give it a quick test by starting xbindkeys up in a terminal, the buttons should all work correctly. It could be tested in nautilus by seeing if the back button will move back a folder.

Install Samba Server on Ubuntu

Install Samba Server on Ubuntu


If you want to share files between your Ubuntu and Windows computers, your best option is to use Samba file sharing.

To install, first open a terminal window and enter the following command:

sudo apt-get install samba smbfs

We’ve got samba installed, but now we’ll need to configure it to make it accessible. Run the following command to open the configuration file, substituting your editor of choice:

sudo gedit /etc/samba/smb.conf

Find this section in the file:

####### Authentication #######

# “security = user” is always a good idea. This will require a Unix account
# in this server for every user accessing the server. See
# /usr/share/doc/samba-doc/htmldocs/Samba-HOWTO-Collection/ServerType.html
# in the samba-doc package for details.
; security = user

Uncomment the security line, and add another line to make it look like this:

security = user
username map = /etc/samba/smbusers

This will set Samba to use the smbusers file for looking up the user list.

Create a Samba User

There are two steps to creating a user. First we’ll add that username to the smbusers file.

sudo gedit /etc/samba/smbusers

Add in the following line, substituting the username with the one you want to give access to. The format is ubuntu-usuername = “username”. You can use a different samba user name to map to an ubuntu account, but that’s not really necessary right now.

joe = “joe”

Next, we’ll run the smbpasswd utility to create a samba password for the user.

sudo smbpasswd -a

Now you can create samba shares by right clicking in Nautilus and defining the share in properties/sharing.

Enable DVD playback and other 'restricted' extras.

This information is taken from the Ubuntu Documentation (here) and any copyright remains with them. This is here for my own use.

Playing Restricted Formats in Ubuntu.

Follow these steps to play most common multimedia formats, including MP3, DVD, Flash, Quicktime, WMA and WMV, including both standalone files and content embedded in web pages.

Using the GUI (Synaptic)

• Go to Applications → Add/Remove...

• Set Show: to All available applications

• Search for ubuntu-restricted-extras and install it. Note that there is also xubuntu-restricted-extras (for Xubuntu) and kubuntu-restricted-extras (for Kubuntu.)

Or open the Terminal (much faster), and execute the following command:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras