Tips & How-To's

LiveCDs are a great way to try out (new) Linux distros on your system. Unfortunately CDs get scratched pretty easily, and can turn into a coaster pretty soon. With prices of USB pen drives at rock bottom, they’re probably the best way to try out LiveCDs. Generally its not that easy to make a bootable LiveCD using USB pen/flash drives. If you’re a Fedora lover then here’s a very easy way to create a bootable USB pen drive.

Remember that all these assumes that your router is connected to the LAN port, if it’s connected to the USB port, then disconnect it and connect to the LAN port. If you dont have a LAN card, then consider getting one. It’s cheap, costs around Rs. 200. Next, it’s best to have the router configured in pppoe mode. In this case you just have to switch on the router, the router and DHCP will take care of the rest.

In my stash of ebooks, quite a few of them are in chm (compiled HTML) file format. Being HTML files I though they’d open in Mozilla Firefox browser. Unfortunately that didn’t work, so I started looking for CHM viewers. I didn’t have to look far, a quick search on Google gave me couple of programs. KChmViewer: Since I’m a KDE user I tried out this application - and it works fantastic.

Admin's Note: This solution was emailed to me by Bharath, as he was facing this problem and found a solution to this. If you want to drop a tip or a hack, just send me an email via the contact-me form and I might just publish it Sometimes when playing native games in Linux they may appear transparent. This may feel good for some people. I felt games should be opaque so that the visibility of the game is more realistic and gameplay experience is better.

Today as I booted into my openSUSE box, for reasons unknown to me, my LVM partitions failed to mount. fsck didn’t help, and and LVM based container system meant that I couldn’t use the standard mount /dev/sdxx style of mounting as well. With my /home and / configured as a LVM, the root (/) partition was active, but the /home partition was not being mounted, as a result, X and KDM wouldn’t start, giving a console login.

Consider this situation. You have multiple programs installed for a particular file type. Now double clicking it opens an application, but you want it to open in another application. For example, you want your images to open in showFoto instead of Gwenview, so how do you go about doing this? Let me show you how to do so! First, launch KDE settings, by clicking on the K menu and then Configure Desktop.

Most of the how-to’s and fixes posted here, are generally my experiences and I post them on how I went about fixing it. This particular how-to was mentioned to me by my very good friend, Bharath, who had this annoying problem of the title bars of every window crashing and disappearing when Emerald is chosen as the decorator. Generally, I’d recommend running gtk-window-decorator --replace or metacity --replace in terminal - that generally does reinitialize the window decorators.

In the past I’ve done couple of posts explaining few of the common commands. A handy one-glance reference guide is always nice, and found this on Reddit.

Unlike Linux which can mount and access Windows’ FAT, FAT16, FAT32 and NTFS filesystems, Windows is incapable of even acknowledging and detecting a Linux filesystem. Fear not, here are 3 softwares which can help in detecting your Linux partition under Windows Ext2fsd- The most capable software of the lot. Has read/write support to your Linux partition. The 0.45 version supports replay of journal of a ext3 filesystem in case of a unclean shutdown of your Linux partition.

Debian and other debian-based distros like Ubuntu have, by default, has the root account disabled as a security measure.(thanks to Subbu and PICCORO for the clarification) To re-enable the root account, just open the command prompt, and type sudo passwd root You’ll get the following set of messages: sathya@sathya-laptop:~$ sudo passwd root<br /> Enter new UNIX password:<br /> Retype new UNIX password:<br /> passwd: password updated successfully<br /> sathya@sathya-laptop:~$ To disable root access, just type