Applications

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Set Up Your Own Cloud Storage With ownCloud

May 30, 2011 in Applications | 1 comment

Last Sunday on The Linux Action Show they talked about free and open source applications that replaces Google’s services. One of the applications that they brought up was ownCloud, which is a is a file hosting service that works like Dropbox. ownCloud is a web based application that you host on your own web hosting service, which means that you have full control of both the application and of your files. The current stable version is 1.2 and can be downloaded from their website:

ownCloud started as a project not long ago, which means that the development hasn’t come very far yet. But I think it’s promising.

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Make Gedit A Powerful Programmer Text Editor With GMate

May 30, 2011 in Applications, Linux | No comments

On the latest episode of The Linux Action Show they mentioned a really cool plugin package to Gedit that adds many useful features for programmers. It’s called GMate and can be found here:

Here are the installation instructions if you are running Ubuntu (or Mint):

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-on-rails/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gedit-gmate

GMate also comes with A LOT of themes and some syntax highlighting improvements.

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Disable Add-on Compatibility Checking In Firefox 7.0a1 Nightly

May 26, 2011 in Applications, Firefox | 1 comment

I just updated my Firefox installation under Linux Mint 10, so now I’m apparently using Firefox 7. Can’t say that I have seen anything new from what is in the Firefox 5 beta, but whatever.

Because I updated Firefox it disabled all my add-ons, as usually. To get them working again in Firefox 7.0a1, follow these steps:

  1. Open a new tab.
  2. Type about:config in the address bar.
  3. Right click anywhere on the page and click on Boolean under New.
  4. Enter this as the preference name: extensions.checkCompatibility.nightly
  5. Click OK.
  6. Choose false and then click OK again.
  7. Restart your browser and all your add-ons should be runnable again.

Since we don’t have to type in the version number in the preference name any longer (extensions.checkCompatibility.XXX), I suppose that we won’t need to update this in future versions of Firefox.

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Possible Solutions To Two Wine Problems

May 23, 2011 in Applications, Linux | No comments

I have for some time now tried to get games like Team Fortress 2 and Mirror’s Edge to run in Linux Mint 10 64-bit through Wine. However, it haven’t gone very well so I’m only able to play them with really, really bad performance. But maybe will some of the stuff that I found help somebody else, so I will post what I found in this blog post. The graphics card that I have is an Asus Radeon HD 6870, and the driver is the proprietary display driver (CCC 11.5) found on amd.com.

My games won’t start – nothing happens

Try to update your system with aptitude. That was what solved the problem for me.

sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install
sudo aptitude upgrade

(Not really sure why sudo aptitude install installed some updates when I first ran it)

No direct rendering

I had the problem that running glxinfo | grep direct in the terminal returned the following line:

direct rendering: No (LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT set)

However, if I ran it with sudo (sudo glxinfo | grep direct), it returned:

direct rendering: Yes
  • Here is a link to a thread with somebody having the same problem. The first possible solution that is given in this thread is to add the following lines to your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file: 
    Section    "DRI"
Group      "video"
Mode       0660
EndSection
  • The second one that is given in the thread is to add your user account to the video group. To find where you do this, open the MintMenu and search for Users and Groups.
  • Another suggestion that I found was to type this line into the command line: 
    unset LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT

    This did only work for me in the current open terminal window. So when I opened a new one, it went back to saying No.

  • The final solution, that actually worked for me, was to disable the Compiz desktop effects.

Here is the thread where I got to know much of the stuff above: http://forum.winehq.org/viewtopic.php?p=61294. But as I said, I still have pretty bad performance in my games and I’m to lazy to fix it. I think I will keep on gaming on Windows, and doing all other stuff on Linux.

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Monitoring Bandwidth From The Terminal With bwm-ng

May 14, 2011 in Applications, Linux | No comments

I found a really neat terminal application that monitors the bandwith to and from your computer. It’s called bwm-ng (Bandwidth Monitor Next Generation) and can be installed with the following command if you are using a Debian-based distro:

sudo aptitude install bwm-ng

Here is a screenshot of the program in action:

bwm-ng

bwm-ng

You can find out more about this app on the following links:

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Change Back Google Search in Linux Mint

May 2, 2011 in Applications, Firefox, Linux | 11 comments

Apparently has the dudes behind Linux Mint decided that they want their own Google search engine in Firefox, which lacks many functions. Here follows some steps you shall take to change it back to the default search page:

  1. Open a terminal window.
  2. Type these lines after one another: 
    cd /usr/share/linuxmint/common/artwork/firefox/
sudo wget http://mxr.mozilla.org/firefox/source/browser/locales/en-US/searchplugins/google.xml?raw=1 -O google.xml.fixed
sudo mv google.xml google.xml.orig
sudo mv google.xml.fixed google.xml
sudo cp google.xml /usr/lib/firefox-addons/searchplugins/en-US/google.xml
  3. Maybe you have to restart Firefox now.

I found this solution on the Linux Mint forum: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=17438

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Install Gens/GS (Megadrive Emulator) On 64-bit Ubuntu

May 1, 2011 in Applications, Games, Linux, Ubuntu | 5 comments

Sometimes I download and listen to Retroresan, which is a Swedish podcast about retro games. Recently they talked about the game Disney’s Aladdin to Megadrive, and it sounded pretty fun. So I searched and found a emulator called Gens/OS that seems to work great on Ubuntu 11.04 64-bit. However, it isn’t made for 64-bit OS:es, but it runs fine if you force install it. Here are the steps you have to take:

  1. Visit http://segaretro.org/Gens/GS, scroll to the bottom of the page and download the most recent version to Ubuntu.
  2. Make sure you have ia32-libs installed by typing these commands in the terminal: 
    sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ia32-libs
  3. Then navigate to your downloads folder in the terminal, and type this line to install Gens/GS: 
    sudo dpkg --force-architecture -i gens_2.XXX_i386.deb
  4. Now the emulator should pop up under your Games category.

Here follows some links:

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Disable “click selects all” in Firefox for Ubuntu

April 22, 2011 in Applications, Firefox, Linux, Ubuntu | No comments

Anime Girl FirefoxIn Firefox for Windows, you are able to double click a segment of the URL in the address field to select it. By default, this isn’t possible in Firefox for Ubuntu, instead selects a single click the whole address. Luckily, this is easy to change, which you can do by following these steps:

  1. Open a new tab.
  2. Type about:config in the address bar.
  3. Press the I’will be careful, I promise! button.
  4. Type selects in the filter field.
  5. Change the browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll entry to false by double clicking on the row.
  6. Do the same as above with the browser.urlbar.doubleClickSelectsAll, and make sure both are false.
  7. Done!

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Fix Autocomplete in Eclipse

January 25, 2011 in Applications | 1 comment

My ability to autocomplete code in Eclipse just stopped to work. But the problem was easily solved by doing the following steps: Open the Preferences window, navigate to Java > Editor > Content Assist > Advanced, tick everything that sounds right and finally Press OK.

If you have another possible solution, please share it below in a comment.

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Dark Theme to Eclipse, Notepad++, Visual Studio and Vim

January 22, 2011 in Applications | 1 comment

Hi! In this post I just want to recommend a nice theme that is available to the popular text editors and IDEs Eclipse, Notepad++, Visual Studio and Vim. It’s called Prabir’s Dark Theme and I have a link to the download page below. I’m using the theme in Eclipse and it works great.

Prabir's Dark Theme

Prabir's Dark Theme

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