Author Archives: cviorel - Page 4

XMLStarlet: command line XML toolkit

XMLStarlet is a set of command line utilities (tools) which can be used to transform, query, validate, and edit XML documents and files using simple set of shell commands in similar way it is done for plain text files using UNIX grep, sed, awk, diff, patch, join, etc commands.

This set of command line utilities can be used by those who deal with many XML documents on UNIX shell command prompt as well as for automated XML processing with shell scripts.
Ubuntu allready has it in the repos, so issue the following command in your terminal to install it:

Vacuum your Firefox 3

This tip will hopefully speed up your Firefox 3 by optimizing it’s database.
Firefox stores your browsing data using SQLite – self contained, small footprint database.
Having database store your browsing data has one drawback, you have to optimize the database from time to time to get rid of old, deleted data, re-index the columns etc.
Otherwise you keep all the junk data mixed in with your real data.
In SQLite is the statement to do this called VACUUM. So here’s how to vacuum your Firefox:

1. Download sqlite command line client for your platform. In Ubuntu, go to yout terminal and issue the following command:

2. Turn off your Firefox
3. Go to your profile folder
4. Issue the command:
* For Linux

* For Windows

Enjoy!

Turn off or limit the Recent Documents feature in Ubuntu

If you want to turn off the Recent Documents feature in Ubuntu, all you have to do is create a .gtkrc file in your home directory.

Then add gtk-recent-files-max-age=0 to this file.

This is documented here.
This will also work in any other linux distribution running Gnome.
Enjoy!

Ubuntu One coming to Windows

At PyCon 2010, Ubuntu One development team will focus on helping Ubuntu users who also use a Windows box. This is great news!
Source.

Skype for Linux 2.1 beta2

Skype just released Skype for Linux 2.1 beta2 aka “Talking Screens”.
Chats are faster, UI supports switching styles on the fly, and audio is a lot better than before. You can download it here.
What’s new in this version:
– Screen sharing
– Quote a message in chat
– Localized time formats
– Support for UI styles
– Report abuse
You can view the detailed changelog here.

TIP: If you use a darker theme (I use Dust), the menus will look ugly.

skype2.png skype1.png


To fix this, go to Options (CTRL+O) and under General, select Desktop Settings or GTK+ for the style.
Restart Skype and enjoy!

Disable splash screen in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

You can disable the splash screen and instead view details about your boot process by following the next steps:
1. Edit grub

2. Locate the following line

and remove quiet and splash.
After that, the line should look like this:

3. Save and exit.

4. Now update the grub:

That’s it!

Karmic Koala Beta on ThinkPad T61 (continued)

After the latest updates, enabling touchpad on/off key (fn-f8) is now working. There are some annoying gdm random restarts without a trace in the logs. I suspect it’s the nvidia proprietary driver and I hope it will be fixed soon.
Here is a better approach to enable the Active Protection System in your ThinkPad:

Search and remove duplicate files

Here a small piece of code which will search for the duplicates in the path you supply. It will generate a new file which contains the commands for deleting those duplicates.
Make sure you double check the resulting file!
The script requires that you have fdupes installed.
Install it in Ubuntu/Debian by running the following command in your terminal:

Karmic Koala Beta on ThinkPad T61

I just installed Ubuntu 9.10 Beta on my LENOVO ThinkPad T61 64608NG.
Here is what I found so far, in two days of intensive usage:

Quadro NVS 140M – 2D and 3D acceleration: tested and works.
Wireless switch: tested and works.
Sound: tested and works.
Enabling touchpad on/off key (fn-f8): not working.
Enabling Active Protection System: works by installing tp_smapi.
Read the complete guide here.
Fingerprint Reader: install thinkfinger-tools and libpam-thinkfinger from the repository and everything works.
Network Card Intel 10/100/1000: tested and works.
Wireless Intel PRO/4965AG: tested and works.
Card reader: not tested.

UPDATE: Power level of the fingerprint reader is set to on by default, so it gets hot pretty fast. Use one of the scripts here to set it to auto at boot time.
Note that the path /sys/class/usb_*/*/device is no longer working. Instead, use /sys/class/usbmon/usbmon*/device/usb*/*.
Here is the complete script for that, taken from thinkwiki.org and modified to reflect the new path.

How to fix menu icons in GNOME 2.28

In the latest release of GNOME, they decided to turn off icons in menus by default. This is ugly and if you ask me, not practical at all.
However, you can get those icons back by going to System → Preferences → Appearance, and under the Interface tab, you can check the box “Show icons in menus”. The new GNOME also removes stock icons from buttons. The the above option does not put them back.
To enable icons in menus and butttons, run in your terminal:

Before:
before_2009-10-05-085517_1120x832_scrot before_2009-10-05-085452_1120x832_scrot
After:
after_0-05-085605_1120x832_scrot after_0-05-085554_1120x832_scrot