Numlock Persistence in Gnome 3

For some reason numlock is reset every time Gnome 3 shuts down returning to its default state (off). I think most people would expect it to remember its state but this is sadly not the case. But this is Linux, so there is always a work around.

Personally I don't ever want numlock turned off, so this work around is more about always starting up with numlock turned on rather than having it remember its previous state.

Reenabling the Delete Key in Gnome 3 Nautilus

In Nautilus Gnome 2, the Delete key used to send selected items to the trash. To do the same in Gnome 3, you now have to use the shortcut: Ctrl+Delete. That's kind of annoying. To change it back, grab dconf-editor from the repos if you don't have it.
sudo yum install dconf-editor

Things To Do On Installing Fedora 15 And Tweaking Gnome-Shell

I've started using the beta of Fedora 15 (Lovelock) that uses Gnome-Shell and it is awesome! I really dig the new interface. It's clean and simple and stays out of the way. There are no menus to search through to open applications or common files and the integrated chat is just amazing. But it should still be considered beta software. Too many things that you would think were basic changes require command line tweaks or coding knowledge. There are a lot of settings that used to be easy to change in Gnome 2 that aren't easily accessible anymore. Gnome 3 is not yet ready for the computer un-savvy.

Facebook Privacy Settings

A while back, Engadget posted a way to better handle Facebook privacy by using friend lists. Around the time I was also playing around with the idea and admit to stealing some of Nilay Patel's to better round out the modular solution I ended up with.

Chromium Tor-Button

Here's a great LifeHacker tutorial on how to get a button to easily enable and disable Tor in Chrome/Chromium. For those who haven't used Tor before it's a free network of distributed proxies that "prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, [and] prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location." For more information visit www.torproject.org.

Using tmpfs for Security and Speed

I have 3.9GBs of RAM of which Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) hardly touches more than 512MBs so I'm going to move all my temporary files to RAM. This will result in 2 things:

• Reading and writing temporary files will be much faster.
• Temporary files will be more securely removed on shutdown.

Nautilus Thumbnails with Drop Shadows

Replace ugly white bordered thumbnails in nautilus with a drop-shadow effect

nvidia-current Driver Failing to Load

I've had a really odd issue bothering me the entire time that I've been running Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx). About half the time when I start up my computer I get a message that Ubuntu has failed to load the proprietary nvidia driver and is running in low graphics mode.

Setting Up Lucid Lynx

It's been a long time since I've posted anything, it seems I just don't have the ego required to maintain a regular blog. Oh well, I'll continue posting things that I find interesting at my own pace. Like a lot of my posts are probably going to be, today's post will mostly be for my own benefit. I want to write down all that I did to set up my new install of Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx). That way if things go wrong I won't have to depend on my terrible memory to set it all back up again.

64 bit GnoMenu

GnoMenu is a fantastic project to get a main menu for Gnome that IMHO looks a little nicer than a plain menu system. Check it out:

Gnome-panel Transparency Without Shadow

Enabling desktop effects in Ubuntu can be a beautiful thing but it's default handling of window shadows with another effect I like to have which is to make my panel transparent. While I like having my windows make shadows (it makes them look more 3D), I hate it when my transparent panel casts one too.

Missing GPG Key?

Today I was installing Ubuntu on my new laptop (my Compaq F700 was sadly destroyed by extensive hardware failure for no apparent reason; the motherboard, hard drive and possibly everything else is all gone. It's been replaced by a shiny new Asus K60). I missed grabbing the GPG key for a new source I was installing. Rather than go track that down I found a more general solution for any missing GPG key.

Installing XPCE Prolog in Ubuntu

One of my current coding projects at UBC right now is designing a program to help someone play the board game Clue (aka. Cluedo). I can't give away any of the implementation details because part of our grade will depend on how well our program helps us play against the other teams, but I just wanted to share how I got XPCE (the graphical user interface library for Prolog) to work under Ubuntu as it doesn't by default. I did find some help online but it took me a while to understand what this guy meant when he explained the fix. Hopefully I can clear up how to do it.

Guide to Setting Up the Perfect Karmic Desktop

Mostly for my own benefit I'm going to describe the process I go through to setup my desktop on a new install of Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala). The benefit for myself is that if anything goes horribly wrong, a reinstall becomes incredibly easy as everything I've done is written down in one place.

Swiftweasel and Add-on Collections

I decided to move over to Swiftweasel for the majority of my web browsing needs. The performance boost given by the processor optimizations isn't very big but I'll try anything if it makes my system faster =P (Side Note: I chose Swiftweasel over Swiftfox because it's AUR package was up to date, while Swiftfox was still based on 3.0. They are essentially the same thing.)

Resizing Openbox Windows

Alt + Right Click resizes window! (At least in Openbox, I don't know about other window managers) This ground breaking revelation was shown to me by iggykoopa. Many thank yous, my man!

Writeback Journalling

ext3 and ext4 have 3 ways of journalling data: writeback, ordered and journal modes. By default most distros use ordered. However in most cases writeback mode will give faster performance. So I'll show you how to switch over. Check out a more detailed explanation of these journalling options.

Auto-login

Found an interesting post in the Arch Forums on how to auto-login and start X on boot. I wouldn't suggest using this by default (I've only used it to time my preload tests). Depending on where you keep your computer and whether it's a laptop (like mine) that you take out in public, it can be quite a security risk, allowing anyone who can push your power button access to all your files.

Bash aliases and functions

Aliases are a great thing to put into your ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_aliases file to speed up your use of the command line and functions are even better. So I'm going to share a few that I've collected and created.

HPET problems

I have a Compaq Presario F700 laptop. I love it. The only issue I've run into with it, that's hard ware related, is a weird tendency for the boot process to stutter while under battery power. When not plugged in and booting there are several points where it freezes and I have to press a key to get it to continue booting. This happened both while running Ubuntu 8.10 and 9.04 and Arch, each with the latest kernel at the time. So I'm pretty sure it isn't software related.