Karmic various tricks

Logout messages If you are opening a terminal to a different server or do a su in a terminal then on logout you will be required to enter your password in order to confirm the logout action. Since the polkit-gnome-authorization does not work with the new polkit version which ships with ubuntu and the polkit-auth command does not seems to work either I’ve found after some research that the solution resides in editing the /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/org....

November 25, 2009 · len

Sony Ericsson C510

Apparently a cup of tea more bad than good in preventing the AH1N1 flu for my old phone which completely died (drowned) as of the procedure. In conclusion I had to choose fast and I did choose the best of the worst which was the single phone with no opening parts, relatively squared buttons and almost free for my operator. Since I see the phone as a basic tool which does not need much else than the ability to make a call this is most reasonable....

November 22, 2009 · len

Changing dates format in Thunderbird

Since my migration to thunderbird I did not had many things to complain but one of the remaining things was the date format. I am expecting to have something like DD/MM/YY or at least DD MMM YYYY. I did not imagined this could be something else than configuration somewhere. Or not… After some digging I found out there is no way to configure the date string but the only way to change the date is to change the locale the application is using....

November 16, 2009 · len

Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala netbook

I’ve also migrated my Acer Aspire One to the new Karmic Koala easy as before using the recommended installation mechanism. One of the things I missed was the SSD specific configuration. This netbook I am using has a very slow SSD drive and I’ve experienced some slowdowns due to the time spent reading and writing the disk. I also wanted to reduce the SSD wear. Here are some steps I have took:...

November 6, 2009 · len

Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

This ubuntu installation was the bit of fun expected after a few tiresome weeks so I grabbed the cd while still hot and started the installation. As usual the install went smoothly except the fact that I probably mistyped my usual password so I had to modify the /etc/shadow afterward to log in. I was not expecting many changes but there are some graphical changes, the gdm seemed changed and after login I was greeted with a “DISK HAS MANY BAD BLOCKS” message since now there is a tool (palimpsest) which reads the S....

October 30, 2009 · len

Evolution to Thunderbird migration

I have been using Evolution since more than 7 years now as my default email client and it has been more than a while that I have been disapointed with it mostly because of how slow it handled new mail. I have assumed that most of the fault was due to spamassasin spam filtering plugin. I tried on numerous occasions to change the default Ubuntu spamassassin and evolution configuration but with little if any results....

October 11, 2009 · len

Python uno openoffice automatization

This is a very short example I managed to do in not a very long time which does the following things: opens an openoffice draw document modifies a field exports it as ps (using print to file) Ah, and it does that from an external python program. The setup In order to run a python script you need: to set the python path to include the uno lib and start a ooffice server...

September 21, 2009 · len

Sending a fax in ubuntu

Conexant fax-modem configuration In the process of sending a fax in ubuntu on my Dell D820 I did not expected at all that the bigest problem would be getting the modem driver to work. I guess I forgot the old days of linux driver configuration. So, after loosing almost an hour with the linuxant “free” drivers which do not allow fax and the dell free drivers which somehow managed to kill my sound I finally found the solution on ubuntu site which solved the problem and I got both modem and sound back....

September 20, 2009 · len

The geek’s alphabet

The geek’s alphabet: a, b, c ls –a gpsd –b -N -D2 /dev/ttyUSB0 ping –c 10 psql –d test ps –e ps –f ssh len@niobe –g -L 5432:localhost:5432 psql –h localhost test tcpdump –i eth0 iptables -A LOG_DROP –j DROP cvs add –kb *.odt ls –l...

September 18, 2009 · len

Quick: ttf fonts and cisco vpn

2 short tricks on ubuntu linux (9.04 Jaunty): Install a .ttf font #create a fonts dir sudo mkdir -p /usr/share/fonts/truetype/myfonts #copy the font sudo cp myFont.ttf /usr/share/fonts/truetype/myfonts #update fonts cache fc-cache -fv Note: if you are using an application don’t expect the fonts to be refreshed dynamically, just restart it. Create a cisco vpn connection apt-get install vpnc Create a /etc/vpnc/myvpn.conf. If you want to convert an existing .pcf file check this article....

September 15, 2009 · len