Tips & How-To's

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 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.

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:

Howdy folks! Been a loong time since I last posted isn’t it? Just been busy with work & travel (won’t bore you with the details, just check my personal blog). I’ve been looking forward to the upcoming openSUSE 11.2 version ( it’s no secret that I’m a fan of openSUSE), but the main problem for me was that I don’t like holding onto optical media, and have a 8gig USB flash disk, especially for these things.

I’ve been using Dropbox pretty extensively ever since its private beta days and just love its simplicity and ease with which I can keep all my files in sync across multiple computers. Even more awesome is its simple web interface - just upload a file and boom, the file you uploaded gets sync’d across all your computers. This coupled with Transmission‘s ability to start downloading torrents automatically when a torrent file is available in a folder means you can start torrent downloads from anywhere, even if your computer is not accessible.

Not many know of this, but as of KDE 4.2, Kwin, the window manager has a nifty little feature - it can grab videos of desktop much like a screencasting tool such as Camtasia. This functionality requires Kwin’s composition mode to be enabled (ie, you must be using Kwin’s desktop effects). Below video shows where and how you can enable the video recording feature. Note this video was recorded using KWin.

Here’s a short tip: If Amarok 2.0 doesn’t add any songs to your playlist or collection, or the collection scan is getting hung at up 47% or 79% try installing mysql. Since Amarok 2 now makes use of mysql as its backend, it expects mysql to be installed(nope, mysql-client won’t do either). As a result, after scanning, it cannot add the songs to the collection database and the process just stops.

While going through some of KDE settings I found this simple way to enable Anti Aliasing for Fonts (also known as ClearType in Windows). This will definitely make your fonts more pleasing to look at. For this, just launch KDE settings - this is generally known as Configure Desktop in openSUSE or System Settings in Kubuntu. From there, Under Look & Feel, Click on Appearance. Navigate to Fonts, and under use Anti-Aliasing, choose Enabled from Dropdown box