Tips & How-To's

This is just a quick tip. If you are getting this error message in Synaptic: E: Unable to parse package file /var/lib/apt/extended_states (1) E: _cache->open() failed, please report or this error in apt-get in command line: Reading package lists… Done Building dependency tree Reading state information… Error! E: Unable to parse package file /var/lib/apt/extended_states (1) and both just fail to open or install, then just execute this in command line (terminal):

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

Well recently I’d bought an external 750GB USB hard disk, as I was running out of space on my laptop. Now this drive requires an external power source, so I just cant lug it everywhere with my laptop in my room so I thought I’ll connect this to my other laptop, and share the drive (the other laptop is my office one, runs on Windows) and I could access this drive over WiFi.

PeerGuardian 2, is an awesome IP filtering software. Though its FOSS, it there isn’t a Linux port of it yet. But don’t worry, if you’re using KTorrent, you can make use of PeerGuardian’s filters. Let me show how you can do so. Launch KTorrent. Click on On Settings -> Configure KTorrent . Click on Plugins and ensure that IP FIlter is checked Now Click on Apply. Next on the sidebar, scroll down and click on IP Filter.

In my previous posts I’d written on how to mount your partitions using the mount command. In the post I’d mentioned that you’d have to mention the partition that you want to mount by specifying /dev/device_name as part of the command. The question that would come to your mind is, How do I know which of my partition is on what device? So let me show how to find out which partition is on what device!

While exploring Fedora 10 Beta, I found this neat little app called Phone Manager. The about page of PhoneManager states Phone Manager is a program created to allow you to control aspects of your mobile phone from your GNOME 2 desktop.. The about page does seem ambitious, somewhat like gammu/Wammu but so far only SMS(text messaging) send/receive feature has been implemented, its been done so very nicely! PhoneManager sits unobtrusively in the Gnome panel, running in the background.