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

1: The pager

I am always shocked at how few people actually use the Linux pager. It’s been around forever and has always served the same functionality — it offers the user multiple desktops to keep the desktop better organized. I employ the pager like this: With four workspaces, I dedicate each workspace to a different use. My layout looks like this:

* Desktop 1 is for networking tools.

* Desktop 2 is for writing/office tools.

* Desktop 3 is for graphics or video.

* Desktop 4 is for miscellaneous items.

This layout pretty much covers it for me. I’m sure you could find a four-desktop scheme that would better suit your needs.

via Five tips for a more efficient Linux desktop | Five Tips | TechRepublic.com.

More or less my pager usage too.

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.

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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

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I wasn’t aware of this tiny little thing  - the filesystem in the  file created by a Wubi install can be easily mounted as a loop device.

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Nvidia Proprietary Drivers need nvidia-settings to set screen resolution and change other settings. In previous versions of Ubuntu and in other distros to make them permanent (used in every session) you click the “Save to X configuration file”. From Karmic on there is no xorg.conf by default!

As a result, nvidia-settings is not able to save the settings and every time I logged in I had  to change the resolution (Phew!!!). Then Sathya helped me. He gave me a link from Ubuntu Forums. Then I did the following to fix the problem:

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As mentioned openSUSE 11.2 is now available. If you’re on previous versions of openSUSE you can do an inplace upgrade to 11.2 by using zypper.

openSUSE 11.0/openSUSE 11.1

Just change the repos to mention 11.2 instead of 11.0/11.1, as shown in the pic:

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This is the problem that affected me the most in the history of Linux using so far. Image, for two full years i just dint know the solution to this prob is that easy. Too late of me to find out. any ways, better late than never.

So the problem is with FX 5200 Ubuntu liveCD/installation boot will hang mid-way, as to most users, it fills to first three bars and then fails. But the cause is acpi settings create some problem with Ubuntu booting. Nope, “acpi=off” option in Ubuntu boot options does NOT work. Now, that’s what everybody suggests only to know it never helps. Even Sathya suggested to me.

It doesnt work because, BIOS settings dominate at the boot time. The entry makes no sense. SO now does it become clear? You disable ACPI in BIOS!  Wow, that worked like magic for me. Now am running Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) on my PC without any boot problems.

However, shutdown does not work properly. Other things like restart and general stuff work fine.

So try that comment on whether it works.