Setup dual monitor

Currently I'm using Xubuntu as my default desktop. I didn't buy into the whole Unity interface and I find it much better on my netbook.

I found myself without a graphical option to set up dual monitor. So, I had to setup dual monitor from the command line. it really easy.

Type xrandr in the terminal

xrandr

You will see something like this:

And now that you see the monitors that are connected the the pc is as easy  as to tell show what where

$ xrandr --output LVDS --left-of VGA-0

 Note: You can change the --left-of to --right-of you you like

Now, if you want this setup every time you start you computer is just a matter of adding the command to the startup application menu

Sync Firefox addons using Dropbox

I wanted to blog about this a while back but I've been to lazy to do so. I've done this a couple of month ago irritated on the fact that Firefox was unable to sync my addons across computers and I think it was a mistake on their part.

Anyway, this is very easy to do using Dropbox.

First close down Firefox and then go to:

~/.mozilla/firefox

You can use Nautilus for this, is probably faster and easier too. In there should be one folder for each user in Firefox. Go to the one you want to sync the addons with. Probably will be the one with "*.default" in it if you don't have any users in Firefox.

Within that folder will be another folder called:

extentions

Will be this folder the one we are going to sync. Cut this folder on place it in your Dropbox folder. I place mine in:

Dropbox/App_sync/Firefox

 Once you pasted the folder in the right place, right click it and select

Make link

Now cut the link and place it on the folder where we got the original "extensions" folder. Once you placed it in the right place rename it with the original name and that's it.

The only drop back with this method is that Dropbox is not very good at syncing multiple computers at the same time. If you have multiple Firefox opened in different computers and start installing/removing addons at the same time it may give you a problem.

Change magnet links association in linux (Ubuntu)

The Pirate Bay soon will stop serving torrents and a while back I wrote about associating manget links with any torrent client, but that tutorial doesn't work anymore with the newest Ubuntu releases. So, now I'm going to show you how to change the file association so that it will work with any version of Ubuntu or many linux distrobutions.

I'm going to write this tip using ktorrent as it is my favorite torrent client, but if you are using a different client it shouldn't be to hard to change the step to suite your needs. Lets start.

First of all we are going to make sure that you torrent client associates magnet links.

We are going to edit the "*.desktop". They should be under:

/usr/share/applications

in my case because is a kde application it would be under:

/usr/share/applications/kde4

There should be the file we need to open and edit but instead of clicking at it. Open gedit and direct it to that location. You should see a bunch of "*.desktop" files. In my case I will open:

/usr/share/applications/kde4/ktorrent.desktop

In the file you look for the MymeType. You should see something like this:

MimeType=application/x-bittorrent;application/x-torrent;

Now, we will add the magnet association to the file by adding "x-scheme-handler/magnet;" at the end of the MymeType like so:

MimeType=application/x-bittorrent;application/x-torrent;x-scheme-handler/magnet;

Save and close the file. Now we are going to make the system to call the magnet handler we just created by changing/adding the file association. You can change it for each user or the system in general.

The file associations for each user are stored in:

sudo gedit ~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list

The system-wide file associations are stored in:

sudo gedit /usr/share/applications/defaults.list

Now look for "x-scheme-handler/magnet", it may not be there but just make sure not to enter duplicates. Now add/edit this line for the handler to call the same "*.desktop" file we edited before. Because in my case the "ktorrent.desktop" file was under the kde4 folder I have to add it, but if you file was on the root of the "/usr/share/applications" there is no need to add anything. In my case it would look like so:

x-scheme-handler/magnet=kde4-ktorrent.desktop;

Save and close the file. Now, you should be able to open Magnet links with you favorite torrent client.