Tips4Linux.com

Quickly reinstall your favourite applications in Ubuntu

T4L — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 14:10:15 +0000

So you want to wipe your hard drive clean and reinstall a fresh Ubuntu copy. Before you do that, it might be wise to make a list of currently installed packages and reinstall them in a jiffy afterwards on the new OS:

sudo dpkg --get-selections > package_list.txt

Save the text file on a thumb drive, format the drive, reinstall Ubuntu, then to a

sudo dpkg --set-selections < package_list.txt
sudo apt-get -y update
sudo apt-get dselect-upgrade

Source

Get rid of OpenOffice.org’s logo in Linux

T4L — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 15:38:48 +0000

If you for whatever reason dislike OpenOffice.org’s logo or want to gain an extra few seconds of speed while the application loads, you can disable OO.o’s logo by editing the

/etc/openoffice/sofficerc

file and modifying the

Logo=1

value into

Logo=0

Greatly improve the speed of Firefox 3

T4L — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 16:00:33 +0000

We all know Firefox is a memory hog. To speed things up greatly, do the following:

1. Open Firefox and in the address bar type about:config.
2. Click on “I’ll be careful, I promise“
3. Use the search bar above to look for network.http.pipelining and double click on it to set it’s value to True.
4. Create a new boolean value named network.http.pipelining.firstrequest and set that to True, as well.
5. Find network.http.pipelining.maxrequests, double click on it, and change its value to 8.
6. Look for network.http.proxy.pipelining and set it to True.
7. Create two new integers named nglayout.initialpaint.delay and content.notify.interval, set them to 0.
8. Restart your browser.

All done. You should feel the browser is 5x more responsive than before while navigating websites.

Change your MAC address in Linux

T4L — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 06:21:41 +0000

If you wish to change your MAC address in Linux, all you have to do is bring the interface down then use the hw ether switch:

ifconfig eth0 down
ifconfig eth0 hw ether 02:01:02:03:04:08
ifconfig eth0 up

Use the same GTK theme for applications started as root

T4L — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 06:49:54 +0000

If you start a GTK GUI with root permissions and you notice that it uses the old GTK theme, you can make all applications started as root to use your current theme by doing this:

sudo ln -s ~/.themes /root/.themes
sudo ln -s ~/.icons /root/.icons
sudo ln -s ~/.fonts /root/.fonts

This will basically create symlinks to your icons, fonts and themes directories that draw your current GTK theme.

Disable NTP sync during USplash in Ubuntu Linux

T4L — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 10:20:34 +0000

NTP sometimes greatly slows down your Ubuntu’s boot time. To disable it just do a simple

sudo apt-get remove ntpdate

Disable the Linux screen blanking

T4L — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 08:12:21 +0000

If you want to disable X screen blanking (aka. disable the X screensaver) that comes up unexpectedly while you’re watching a movie in MPlayer, all you have to do is

setterm -powersave off -blank 0

To make the change permanent, add the following to your ~/.xinitrc file:

setterm -blank 0 -powersave off -powerdown 0
xset s off

Play videos packed in RAR without extracting them in Linux

T4L — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 07:13:39 +0000

Most DivX/XviD movies you download from Torrent sites are packed in multiple RAR archives. It takes some time for each to extract. If you don;t want to wait, you can use VLC and unrar to play the file within instantly. You won’t be able to rewind and move fast forward within the file, but you’ll be able to play it and stop the movie without actually unarchiving the video file. Here’s how:

unrar p -inul /path/to/movie_folder/movie.name.r00 | vlc -

This will let you enjoy the video without extracting it first.

Enable Flash support in Google Chrome for Linux

T4L — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 07:43:04 +0000

If you want to have Flash support in Google Crome, the Linux version, you can enable it like this:
Make a plugins directory in the Google Chrome folder

sudo mkdir /opt/google/chrome/plugins

cd to it

cd /opt/google/chrome/plugins

make a link from Firefox’s Flash Player plugin into the newly created folder

sudo ln -s ~/.mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so

Now launch the browser with this command:

google-chrome --enable-plugins

Find out your router’s external IP address using the Linux command line

T4L — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 19:31:31 +0000

If you want to find out what external IP address your router has assigned to it, you can either search the Internet for sites that can display that said IP address or you can use the Linux command line:

wget -O - -q icanhazip.com