My Interesting Ubuntu

Saturday 27 October 2012

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

Saturday 4 February 2012

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.

Friday 13 January 2012

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.

Wednesday 22 June 2011

Create a Launcher manually for Unity

Today was the release of eclipse 3.7 code named Indigo. After installation I wanted a shortcut of the new eclipse on the launcher in Unity but every time I've tried the launcher would just called eclipse in the system which called the default eclipse in Ubuntu which is 3.5.

I wanted the shortcut to call my new eclipse I had installed under /opt. Here is how to:

$ gedit ~/.local/share/applications/eclipse.desktop

And enter the following in the file:

#!/usr/bin/env xdg-open

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Terminal=false
StartupNotify=true
Icon=/opt/eclipse/icon.xpm
Name=Eclipse Indigo 3.7
Exec=env UBUNTU_MENUPROXY=0 /opt/eclipse/eclipse

And save the file. Hope this helps.

I got help from here

Enable DVD Playback

Not that I play DVD's very often but is always good to be able to play DVD's and every time that I've tried they never seemed to work in Ubuntu. I actually always thought it was a bug in Ubuntu and I never bothered to look to much into it (lazy) and always double booted into Windows to play my DVD's as I always thought this was the quickest way to get things going without going for hours through comments on forums looking for the right answer for me.

Today I've seen this post in OMG! Ubuntu which brought new light to my clueless issues with the DVD playback.

Links of interest:

Medibuntu packages - http://packages.medibuntu.org/natty/index.html
Medibuntu Documentation - https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Medibuntu#Adding%20the%20Repositories

Free VPN service providers

It's always good to have some sort of security specially when using public wi-fi networks. After doing a bit of research and trying different things here is the option that work best for me.

There is not software installation involve as Ubuntu already comes with vpn tool pre-installed. You just need to click on the network icon and select "VPN Conections->Configure VPN...", you will be greeted with a new window like this one:

The service provider I used: http://www.bestfreevpn.com/

Just enter the details as shown on the screenshot below. One the things using this service provider is that they change the password every few hours but this is not to bad of an issue. The service they provide is quite good so far.

To be able to use the vpn you just setup you are going to restart the network manager but logging out and back in again. Once you do that you will be able to log into Free vpn by clicking on the network manager on the top right.

Another good service that I haven't been able to work is "itshidden.com" which I'm giving you because you may be more lucky than me.

Thursday 2 June 2011

All about Grub 2 - Adding menu, restoring windows 7 loader, recovering grub, ...

Since upgrading to Ubuntu Natty and changing from grub to grub 2, all what I use to know about grub has been changed.

I had different problems on my pc and my netbook with the menu entries. On my pc Windows 7 would not start and on my netbook the menu option disappeared. I've been going at this for a while and I found some good websites. This is not going to be a follow step by step tutorial as all of the problems have already been solved by somebody else, so there's no need for me to rewrite them all. Instead I'm just going to post the links here as a reference.