For reasons which I am not going to explain here, the root partition of my eeePC (running Ubuntu Intrepid) has gone dangerously low on disk space. Usually, I have about 250MB to 300MB remaining in the partition. But twice now, the free disk space went below 50MB, and once almost at zero. When the disk [...]
Pdftk is a command line tool to manipulate PDF. Some of the features include rearrange, remove, add/merge and rotate pages. Don’t be put off by the lack of GUI. Pdftk is simple to use with easy to understand syntax. It is also one of the few tool where the man page has useful usage examples [...]
Ever since advanced desktop effects (previously Beryl or Compiz, now Compiz Fusion) were introduced, there has been an annoying broken-ness of the default Ubuntu screenshot tool. Basically, the screenshot of a window is missing the window’s frame. This problem was reported two years ago here, and remained unfixed to date. Ok, two years should be [...]
Beginning from Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex, xdotool is added into the repositories. Xdotool is an application that allows you to control various X11 elements from the command line. In other words, you could change a window’s size, send keystrokes to an application, move and click the mouse, etc. So what? I could imagine that being able [...]
Ok, so I have a Samsung USB printer connected to a desktop PC. I thought I would share this PC in the network so I could print from my eeePC. First, enable Samba. I used the steps which I previously described here. Then, install Samsung driver, described here. Finally, add a network shared printer in [...]
Recently, I have been working on the Debian NSLU2. During the process, I usually have at least three terminal windows opened in my Ubuntu PC. In the beginning, these terminal windows were randomly placed on the desktop, usually on top of each other and getting in the way. After awhile, I would have to manually [...]
If you are a regular user of Zenity, you might have noticed an annoying behaviour in Ubuntu Intrepid. This is my problem symptom: I have a bash script, which mount NFS. This script make use of Zenity to present graphical dialogboxes to get the user’s confirmation to mount or unmount. I created a launcher icon [...]
There was something strange about SPDIF (a.k.a. IEC958) support in Ubuntu. This past Sunday, I was grappling with a visit from another nasty Gremlin (will post the full story another day). It all started while trying to fix an annoying problem with the SPDIF. Actually, I discovered later the problem turned out to be unrelated [...]
Recently, I was twice asked about how to change the date format in Ubuntu. I have never bothered to tweak this part in my own setup. So, when asked, I assumed it would be easy to do at first. However, upon searching the Ubuntu desktop, I couldn’t find anything that might change the date format [...]
By default, Ubuntu comes with a dictionary. Whenever you look up a word in this dictionary, it queries the online dictionaries for the results. This is fine if your have a 24/7 internet connection. However, if you are offline, mobile without internet, or has a flaky connection, using this dictionary becomes a pain. Occasionally, my [...]
