Tips & How-To's

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!

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.

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.

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. The solution was pretty simple, just right click the file(type), click on Properties, and Open-With tab Just choose the default application, or click on Add and select VLC, and you’re done!

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’ve owned a Sony Ericsson HBH-DS970 for nearly 2 years now ), and my current iPhone 3G. I also use it occasionally on my laptop. It has worked fine in Windows XP, Vista & Windows 7. Getting it to work with Linux, however has been an EPIC FAIL. The last time I tried it was probably a year ago, and I just gave up in frustration and continued to use my EP-630 as the earphone.

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 You can go back to the default Applications / Places / System panel pretty easily. To do this: Right click the bottom panel and choose add a panel Now right click the top panel and choose Add to Panel In the search input box type “menu”, and you will see about six entries, one of which is “Traditional main Menu” Add the menu to the panel, move it to where you like, and delete the “original” menu.

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 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. To do so, just open the Terminal and type the below: mount -o loop This will make the kernel auto detect the filesystem type and try to mount it. Alternatively, if you’re sure of the filesystem type, mention it explicitly mount -t -o loop

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: Once that’s done, open the terminal, and switch to root su root Then refresh the repos zypper ref Finally, do the distribution upgrade zypper dup openSUSE 11.2 Milestone/RC versions: