1. Search in a new tab

One of the most annoying things for me is when you do a search its results brought to the screen that you reading. I always like the search results in a new tab.

In Filter section type tab and find browser.search.openintab. Change it to true by double-clicking on it.

2. Do not switch to the new tab

Even the “switch immediately” box not checked as you can see below, Firefox switches immediately when you open a link in a new tab. To fix this, in the about:config tab find the browser.tabs.loadDivertedInBackground and make it true by double-clicking on it.

3. Open links at the end of tabs

Firefox opens new tabs to the right of the parent tab. Some may like this. However, when I have many tabs it is easy for me to switch to the new one if it is opened at the end. So find the browser. tabs. insertRelatedAfterCurrent and change it to false this time.

I feel more comfortable with these changes and thanks to Firefox’s easy to use and feature rich about:config tab.

My current operating system is Ubuntu 10.10 and I had Virtualbox 3.2.8 installed. I did install 11.04 but unity did not work on it even 3D acceleration was activated. I installed Virtualbox 4.0.6 by downloading from here and running default Ubuntu software package installer. Newer Virtualbox recognized my previously installed Ubuntu 11.04. I checked the box for 3D acceleration.

As I started the virtual 11.04 I did get the non-unity desktop, which I was expecting. I exited from the full screen view and I was able to see virtualbox menu. I selected “Install Guest Editions” from Device menu. Immediately I saw the CD image on the desktop.

The tricky part for me began after this point. Entering into this Virtualbox additions CD folder and running “autorun.sh” by double clicking on it did not make the unity running for me. Instead, I needed to type sudo ./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run in the terminal from the additions folder.

I restarted the virtual system and unity worked this time. Basically what I did is; installed Virtualbox 4.0.6, enabled 3d acceleration and installed Virtualbox additions correctly. I hope this works for you too.

nano .bashrc

Scroll down a little bit and you should see a line with #force_color_prompt=yes

.bashrc

Remove the # comment sign and Ctrl-X to exit and y to save the file as .bashrc. To get the new .bashrc in the terminal simply type

source .bashrc

That’s it. You got the color prompt!

apt-get install openssh-server

Now, we need to download deb packages from here. Then install them:

sudo dpkg -i nxclient_3.0.0-84_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i nxnode_3.0.0-88_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i nxserver_3.0.0-74_i386.deb

After the installation we need to add a user to nxserver. I am using my regular username which I login to the system.

sudo /usr/NX/bin/nxserver --useradd $username

That’s it. You should be able login to your system by using NX client. Ensure that you have an SSL connection enabled when setting up the connection.

If you want to run SSH and freenx at a different port then you need to change the port numbers at the following files:

sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config
# What ports, IPs and protocols we listen for
Port 22
# Use these options to restrict which interfaces/protocols sshd will bind to
#ListenAddress ::
#ListenAddress 0.0.0.0
Protocol 2

Change the port number and restart the ssh server:
sudo /etc/init.d/ssh restart

Edit the nxserver config file at the two locations where you see SSHDPort:

sudo nano /usr/NX/etc/server.cfg
# Specify the TCP port where the NX server SSHD daemon is running.
#
SSHDPort = "22"


# Specify the TCP port where the SSHD daemon is running on the NX SSH
# authentication server.
#
SSHDAuthPort = "22"

Edit the node config file:

sudo nano /usr/NX/etc/node.cfg
# Specify the TCP port where the NX node SSHD daemon is running.
#
SSHDPort = "22"

Restart the nxserver:
sudo /usr/NX/bin/nxserver --restart

I was not expecting this from Ubuntu. First problem was at partitioning. I have a windows partition located at /dev/sda1. I changed the mount point of this partition to /windows but I suggest to leave it as /media/sda1. Otherwise it stucks at creating ext3 file system for /. Then you need to run Gparted and unmount the windows partition so installer can continue. I spent many hours to find this. This might be a bug because it did not happen in Kubuntu 7.10.

Installation was OK but when I logged in I saw about 400 packages waiting to be upgraded. This surprised me because I wasn’t expecting this much upgrade for a new released distro. Update was slow because of heavy trafiic through servers but went flawless. I think waiting a week after a new release is a good idea.

The second part of the problem was screen resolution. Gutsy installs nvidia-glx-new (100.14.19) as default. If you have a 6xxx or 7xxxx series card, I suggest to use nvidia-glx driver(1.0.9639). With the new driver it can never activate it and falls back to 640×480 resolution. This is my nvidia card:

lspci -nn|grep 300
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: nVidia Corporation NV43 [GeForce Go 6600] [10de:0148] (rev a2)

I first did the full upgrade without enabling restricted drivers. Then restarted the computer and installed nvidia-glx driver from synaptic. Then changed the “nv” driver section of my xorg.conf file to “nvidia” and CTRL+Alt+Backspace. You can do the following trick if borders of the windows are gone when you activate compiz-fusion from System –> Preferences –> Appearance:

sudo nvidia-xconfig --add-argb-glx-visuals -d 24

I added medibuntu repos for the non-free stuff like acrobat reader. The instructions are here. Basically add the repo and the gpg key:

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/gutsy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list
wget -q http://packages.medibuntu.org/medibuntu-key.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add - && sudo apt-get update

For Java and Acrobat Reader type the following:

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-fonts sun-java6-plugin acroread acroread-escript acroread-plugins mozilla-acroread

Now, everything works. It took me almost a day to accomplish all this. I installed Ubuntu two times and Kubuntu once to get it right. Good luck.

du --block-size=1M --exclude='./.*' --max-depth=1 |sort -n

and the output,

--block-size gives the file size in 1 megabyte blocks, --exclude='./.*' does not select the files&folders provided by the pattern which is hidden files&folders and --max-depth=1 shows only the directories. After these options I sort the output so that it lists by ascending according to directory size. The last number 7107 is the total size of my home directory in megabytes except the hidden folders&files. You can put this command as duu into alias list by typing

echo alias duu='du --block-size=1M --exclude='./.*' --max-depth=1 |sort -n' >> ~/.bashrc


df is similar but for file systems. You can check the home and root folder usage easily:

df -h

-h parameter is for human readable output. It provides the total usage in mega or gigabytes. Otherwise numbers are in bytes which is hard to read.

Download seminar and prosper to your home directory,

wget http://tug.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/seminar.zip

download prosper-1.00.4.tar.gz and contrib-prosper-1.0.0.tar.gz from http://prosper.sourceforge.net/.

Installation:

sudo apt-get install kile
sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/share/texmf/tex/latex/
cd /usr/local/share/texmf/tex/latex/
sudo unzip ~/seminar.zip
sudo tar -zxvf ~/prosper-1.00.4.tar.gz
sudo tar -C prosper/ -zxvf ~/contrib-prosper-1.0.0.tar.gz
sudo texhash

It’s ready to use. You may want to take a look at http://amath.colorado.edu/documentation/LaTeX/prosper/ for usage. Kile is an excellent GUI&editor for Latex.

First, you need VMware Player. You can download it from http://www.vmware.com/download/player. I have version 1.0.3 installed on my Windows XP box but you can try the newest one. You need to fill out couple of things to be able to download it. Other than that it is free. After you ran the VMware Player, it will ask you to select a vmx file. If you are clueless about how to make one, this post will show you how to get one.

http://www.easyvmx.com/ is your friend to get configuration files for VMware Player. Click on Super Simple Virtual Machine Creator. You can fill the tables as shown below with your information.

Hit Create Virtual Machine button and save the zip file on to your computer. Extract the package. You will see couple of vmdk and one vmx file. vmdk is your virtual hard drive and vmx is your configuration file. When you double-click on vmx file it will open up the VMware Player and start loading whichever file you specified at LiveCD (ISO) section above picture. Below is showing Fedora 7 boot selection:

You can start installing or playing your virtual Linux system. You will see your virtual hard disk during installation. After the installation we need to make a small change on the configuration file so that we can boot into newly installed virtual OS. Otherwise, VMware player will boot into .iso file. Open up your .vmz file with wordpad and scroll down:

# LiveCD
ide1:1.present = "TRUE"
ide1:1.fileName = "G:\Fedora7\F-7-i386-DVD.iso"
ide1:1.deviceType = "cdrom-image"
ide1:1.startConnected = "TRUE"
ide1:1.mode = "persistent"

Change the TRUE value of startConnected to FALSE. By doing this, we turned of booting into  the .iso file.  You  can  make different configuration files using EasyVMX  and try  different tastes of Linux without  partitioning your hard  drive.

#echo deb http://kern.nl/freenx ./ >> /etc/apt/sources.list
#apt-get update
#apt-get install freenx

You will see freenx configuration screen. I hit OK.

Then it will ask you which type of key you want to use. For simplicity I selected NoMachine Keys.

When the installation ends you need to add a user to nxserver:

#nxserver --adduser $username
#nxserver --passwd $username

You need to substitute $username with your regular username which you use to login your system. You can give a different password. You can use NX Client for Windows. The version that I am using is 1.5.0-114. I also tried the newest version at the time of this writing which is 3.0.0-65 and it works well. Below is a snapshot showing connection to Etch from Suse using knx.