Quick tip – if you use the Terminal as much as I do, ever been in a situation where you’ve written a particularly long command, and then want to issue that command again but can’t recall it ? Use the history command, and pipe it to grep to search it!

history | grep -i <search-term>

This will give you all commands with the search term and the corresponding line number.

To reissue that command, type

!history <line-number>


Simple, easy & effective. CLI ftw.

Starcraft 2 [runs] under my Linux install with no issues. Since the game’s official release a few days ago I have been getting a good bit of traffic on those two pages – so I figured I would put together a quick HOWTO for getting Starcraft 2 working on your Linux distro of choice. The game runs under Wine 1.2 and/or CrossoverGames 9.1.

Crossover 9.1 Starcraft 2 is listed as “officially support” and as such you will find that it has an entry in the automated games installer. The only issue is that after the game has actually finished installing the StarCraft 2 process hangs around – meaning Crossover never actually knows that the game has finished installing and thusly never creates menu entries for it. Thank fully there is a simple fix for this – after Starcraft 2 has finished installing, open up your system monitor and look for any rogue Starcraft 2 processes and kill them off. After you have done this the CXGames installer will know that it has finished installing and will create the menu entries as it should.

[...]

It worked out of the box with my current WINE install (1.2)

via Thoughts on Technology: HOWTO: Starcraft 2 on Linux with Wine.

This is a pretty good tip. The default style irritates me to no end. Check out the full post, there are some great tips, especially if you’re new to Nautilus like me.

Ever since some distros started their attempt to become more “user-friendly” and gaining the nice looks, some default features got changed.

In this case, it’s the location bar. Instead of it they got some buttons that shows the location and let you navigate through the directories! So, if you’re using one of these distros and want to pop up the location bar, all you have to do is to hit Ctrl+L. However, if you’re like me and like to have it always there, each time you fire it up, you canchange the default value of it in gconf-editor, or alternatively use this following command in the terminal

gconftool-2 --set /apps/nautilus/preferences/start_with_location_bar --type bool 1

via anxiousnut’s playground

Ext2Read is a Free & Open Source Software which allows you to browse your Linux partitions in a very Windows Explorer-esque interface. Unlike other tools Ext2Read also supports ext4 filesystem, even if extents feature is enabled. Like the name suggests – Ext2Read can only read, not write to the partitions – so in case you are paranoid about the tool causing data corruption to your Linux partitions, you can drop those fears.

via techie-buzz

digiKam supports watermarking, this feature is hidden so well that you might not even realize that it’s there. This is because the watermarking function in digiKam is tucked under the Batch Queue Manager tool which you can use to watermark multiple photos in one go. Here is how this works in practice. Choose Tools | Batch Queue Manager (or press the B key) to open the Batch Queue Manager tool. Drag the photos you want to watermark from a digiKam album onto the Queues pane to add them to the current queue. Click on the Base Tools tab in the Batch Tools Available pane and double-click on the Add Watermark tool to add it to the Assigned Tools pane.

via Watermark Photos with digiKam « Scribbles and Snaps.

Neat!

A quickie:

I wanted to change the default application from Banshee/Totem for my media files to VLC ( since I didn’t have proprietary codecs installed, and VLC does). Searched all of YaST/Settings and couldn’t find where to change the default application.

[...]

I’ve owned couple of mobile phones now, all in increasing number of features. But the one thing that remained common amongst all of them, was the ability to use a tethered Internet connection in both Windows and Linux. Until I got the iPhone, that is. With the iPhone, I could no longer use the iPhone as a modem in Linux. Not anymore.

I was recently researching about claims that Ubuntu could sync with the iPhone, even the non-jailbroken ones. I was a little skeptical about this. What I found was libimobiledevice, and the iPhone Ethernet driver for Linux. I’ll write on libimobiledevice at a later day.

More @ techie-buzz

Seems like lot of openSUSE Gnome users don’t like the new Gnome panel, which is radically different interface from the traditional Menu bar with Applications/Places/System entries. Personally I prefer the new style, perhaps because I’m used to the openSUSE Kickoff panel, and I really dig the search feature

[...]

Been a while since I posted For some strange reason, recently I got an urge to try out ArchLinux. After much deliberation finally decided to try out ArchLinux again, in VirtualBox. My little install guide I compiled as I was reading through the Official ArchLinux Install Guide + Beginner’s Guide.

Please note: This is highly customized according to *my* requirements and nowhere as thorough /generalized as the official guides. Still, it might help you. Here we go -
[...]

I had this problem with a wubi install. Ubuntu would highly pester me and drop to command shell (that of grub) without showing the boot options (Why and who knows??). I every time will have to boot by manually entering boot options (really painful).  So I did this.

I entered the boot command of the “recovery console” manually by finding it out from grub.cfg through the Live CD. After getting to the repair option I selected the option “Update GRUB”. Then the system did something I dont know. Then after returning to the options I selected the option similar to Boot Normally (whatever the exact wording was). Now, that was a miraculous finding. I restarted and boot worked like it should.

P.S-Something or the other helps me huh??