[How-to] Make nVidia settings persistent and retain the settings in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

Bharath | November 21st, 2009 - 6:45 am


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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Google Chrome – Impressions, Links And Running it in Linux using Wine

Sathya | September 5th, 2008 - 1:37 am


Much like most of Google’s projects Google Chrome was launched all of a sudden yesterday. Though it was “discovered” rather “accidentally” by one a Google insider hitting the send button containing the comic-book type images of Google Chrome’s workings(excuse me, a Google guy hitting the “Send” button accidentally? Yeah,right! (Santosh agrees with me too on this one). And the hype was unprecedented. Once the hype died down and everyone got to try – the impressions were rather more or less universal, mainly being

 

  • Its frikking fast
  • Its too basic
  • Chrome aims IE userbase rather than Firefox
  • Unless addons are brought in, most Firefox users would not switch to Chrome.
  Google Chrome is basically the best of Firefox, Opera, Konqueror, Safari and Internet Explorer all rolled into 1. You have the benefit of rendering engine – WebKit which powers Safari and Konqueror(since Webkit is a fork of KHTML which powers Konqueror), you have the equivalent of Internet Explorer’s InPrivate mode, Opera’s speed dial-like homepage, and Firefox’s addon capability(though not there at the moment).
Now what’s my take ?
Well for one, the homepage is similar yet different from Opera’s speed dial. Unlike Opera’s Speed  Dial which requires you to manually set the web pages, Chrome does so automatically based on which pages you most frequently visit –  One step better than Mozilla Firefox’s Most visited button.

Homepage

You can also search through your history pages, or open your recently closed tab pages right from the home page(Incidentally, it also shares Firefox’s shortcut for Reopening the recently closed tab – just hit Ctrl + Shift + T) and bingo!

I did like the UI – its plain, simple, and free from clutter – gives me maximum space for my web viewing purposes. Just have a look at the pic below – no irritation menu bars or huge buttons (thought the omission of stop button is unforgivable).

Chrome - Full

 

I also like the way the just 2 buttons which are placed next to address bar – these 2 allow you to configure most of Chrome’s options, and have links for openings new tabs, new windows, and the Incognito mode – which, like IE’s InPrivate mode, doesn’t store history, cookies etc of the sites visited under this mode.
Then there are also some neat touches that I like 
  • Re-sizable text boxes. – Unlike most browsers, Chrome gives you an option to resize the text boxes – perfect if you want to type some especially long sentences – say an address probably, but the default width provided was too less. Just hold and drag the handle the edge of the text box and resize
  • Popup status bar at the bottom – Again, unlike most browsers, you don’t have a fixed size status bar, eating away real estate. The status bar pops unintrusively while the page loads and then disappears. It again pops up while hovering over a link – real smooth!
  • Chrome is frikking fast – whether on pages which heavily use JavaScript or not – I suspect its because, like Opera, the WebKit rendering engine grabs and displays text first, images later – this is especially obvious if you’re using a slow connection like I am
  • Chrome seems to be localized to specific countries – For example in the Manage search engine page, Chrome offers me, in the list Choices of MSN India, Guruji, Yahoo! India and Rediff

Search Engines

  • The whole moving tab-thingy is neat! You can detach a tab from a window, and it becomes a separate window! Similarly, moving a lone window to an existing Chrome window attaches it as a tab!

Tabs Tabs detached

 

  • Chrome comes with its own task manager! You can kill any tab, or plugin. And as its been mentioned, every tab is a new process and hence even if 1 tab freezes, it doesn’t take down the entire browser – though Chrome hasn’t crashed at all for me.
Google Chrome is still in beta(the version number is 0.2.149.27) and it shows – there are several drawbacks:
  • One of the MOST CRITICAL drawback, atleast for me is the lack of RSS support – RSS is the killer, I use Firefox’s Live Bookmarks extensively, and can’t live without it. Is this Google’s way of telling we won’t give you an RSS reader, use Google Reader if you want ? Though I _do_ use Google Reader extensively, I would also prefer something like live bookmarks
  • No Addons/extensions as now, but hey, it’s still early days
  • Some pages don’t work with Chrome yet, most notably Google Analytics and Lively!
  • The save/retrieve password is bit of a miss – it suggests passwords based on domains only, and not on sub-domain, page basis
  • It may not consume memory but it _does_ eat up a LOT of CPU.

Task Manager

 

  • The options page is still simplistic, and looks like a direct rip from Firefox. And it uses IE’s proxy settings! Clcik on proxy, and it loads up the Internet settings used by IE – pushed out a little too fast?
  • And hey, WTF is it with that shitty 475kb Bootstrapper thingy huh ? 
All in all, Google Chrome has got a nice start – I will definitely be using both Chrome and Firefox – lets see what the Big G has in store for the future.
Here are some links 

 

An Easy Way to Transfer Data From A Linux Based Virtual Machine to Windows Host(And Vice Versa)

Sathya | May 18th, 2008 - 12:02 pm

In my previous post, I’d mentioned about Virtualization – what it is, how useful it is to test new softwares, distros etc. Now while working in your virtual machine, you’d obviously save some data – do some wordprocessing, or compatibility testing of your programs, just to name some, all this would mean that the data would be stored in the virtual machine.

Now you would like to have this data on your physical machine. Or alternatively you may want to transfer data from your physical machine to your VM. Of course, you could always go about using the concept of shared folders, but this would require installation of guest-additions. On a linux-based guest, this would require running scripts, and these scripts most likely require kernel-header or kernel source files. Going by my past experience, in most default installations, the header files would not be installed, or simply be missing in all of Live-CD based distributions, requiring downloading of the packages from the Internet. Is there a simpler way of going about this? Yes! Lets see how. [...]

Find out how much space each file is occupying

Sathya | March 19th, 2008 - 4:21 pm

Consider this situation. You want to know much space is available on your hard disk. No big deal, du can tell you the stats. For this open the terminal and type du -h. You will get the required details as below

sathya@shaman:~$ du -h /home/sathya/Downloads
35M     /home/sathya/Downloads/kubuntu debs
177M    /home/sathya/Downloads
sathya@shaman:~$ du -h /home/sathya/Downloads/kubuntu\ debs/
35M     /home/sathya/Downloads/kubuntu debs

But this isn’t sufficient, and neither is it very elegant. You want to know how much space each file is occupying, or what’s the max filesize occupied by a file. And you want to achieve this with out any console commands. Sounds tough?

Not really! Konqueror comes with an inbuilt “File Size View” which allows you to do just that. And the neat thing is that this works for all mounted partitons. To open this view, open Konqueror. Right click, choose Preview in and select “File Size View”

File Size View

Once this is selected, another view comes up, showing the size of each file. It may take a minute or two as the filesystem is scanned and the files begin to show up. In the end you’ll get a view like:

File Size View, After Scanning is Complete

This is really useful if you want to free up some space on your hard disk, or if you don’t know which file is taking up all that space.

PS: I don’t know of a similar utility for GNOME, as I don’t use it. Would appreciate it if any GNOME users can comment on a similar app.

PPS: If you’re using KDE 4.x , then as of now, Dolphin doesn’t have the File Size view, so you can’t check this. There’s another program, KDirStat, which can perform the same utility, but I haven’t tested this. Any comment on this would be much appreciated as well!

5 Commands Every Linux Newbie Must Know

Sathya | June 13th, 2007 - 12:43 pm

Although Linux had progressed far from being a command-line only OS to a full fledged totally GUI based one, sometimes, the command line is the best way to get something done. Here are 5 of the must-know commands. These commands can b quite useful and handy.

1: mount: Used for mounting Windows/Other partitions, just in case it isn’t automatically mounted.

Usage:

mount <device> <mount-point>

here <device> refers to the special device where your partitions are.
Rather than referring to partitions as drive letters as Windows, every partition in Linux is indicated by a special device. For eg in case if IDE(parallel ATA drives) the Primary master will be /dev/hda and the primary partition will be /dev/hda1(Windows C:) and the logical partitions will be /dev/hda5, /dev/hda6 and so on(for Windows D:, E:.. so on).

<mount-point> indicates to which directory you want the partition to be available as.

Please note that mount command requires root privileges, so run the command as sudo ie,
sudo mount <device> <mount-point>

Eg: If you wish to mount the Windows C partition to a /windows/C the command will be,sudo mount /dev/hda1 /windows/C

For SATA drives, the “hdx” will be replaced by “sdx” ie, instead of /dev/hda1

it’ll be /dev/sda1

2: tar/bzip2/bunzip2: For extracting archives, this command is useful for extracting to directories other than the home directory, where root privileges are required

Usage:
(i) For GZipped files(.tar.gz extension)

tar xvfz <archive-name>

Eg: If the archive name is some-file.tar.gz, then the command will be

tar xvfz some-file.tar.gz

(ii)For Bzipped files (.tar.bz2 extension)

First, unzip the archive using

bunzip2 <archive-name>

Then untar using the command

tar xvf <archive-name>

Eg: If the archive is some-file.tar.bz2 then first unzip it using

bunzip some-file.tar.bz2

You’ll get the file some-file.tar. Next untar it using

tar xvf some-file.tar

3. rpm/dpkg – Install/Upgrade/Remove RPM/Debian Packages

Usage:

(i) Installing new packages

rpm -ivh <package-name.rpm>

dpkg -i <package-name.deb>

(ii) Upgrade existing packages

rpm -Uvh <package-name.rpm>

dpkg -i <package-name.deb>

(iii) Removing existing packages

rpm -e <package-name>

dpkg -r <package-name>

Note that these commands are suited for individual commands, whose dependencies are met. For complex packages, having many dependencies it’s better to use apt-get/smart.

For smart: smart install <package-name>

For apt-get: apt-get install <package-name>

Again these commands require root privileges, so prefix sudo before each of these commands.

4. cat – Concatenate files and print on the standard output. Useful for viewing short text files, logs without having to open any editors

Usage:

cat /path/to/file

Eg: cat /var/log/syslog

If the text file is lengthy, pipe it via more to scroll ie

cat /path/to/file |more

Eg: cat /var/log/syslog |more

5. dmesg – The program helps users to print out their bootup messages. Instead of copying the messages by hand, the user need only:

dmesg > boot.messages

and mail the boot.messages file to whoever can debug their problem.

dmesg |tail Outputs only the last part of dmesg, and is useful to identify any errors, which occured, say if a removable drive is inserted.