Tux Training

Sometimes when I’ve been messing around on Ubuntu my number pad will quit working.  The number lock is on, I can see the indicator right there.  Toggling the num lock on and off doesn’t fix things.  I found that holding 8, 2, 4, or 6 moves the cursor on the screen though.

This is an Accessibility option that gets turned on to control the cursor with the number pad.  For some reason unknown to me Ubuntu chooses to turn on what it calls “Mouse Keys”.

Continue reading ‘Fix: Number Pad Will Not Work in Ubuntu’ »

Ubuntu 9.04 disabled the semi-crucial keyboard shortcut, Ctrl+Alt+Backspace, that used to force the X graphical server to restart, and made it wonky to re-enable. Luckily, Ubuntu 9.10, due out in nine days, has a single setting to restore it.

Go to System->Preferences->Keyboard settings, then head to the Layouts tab under Keyboard settings, click the “Key sequence to kill the X server” option to expand it, then check “Control + Alt + Backspace” to set it.

Also see: Ctrl+Alt+Backspace Disabled in Most Distributions [FIX]

The next Ubuntu release (9.04, “Jaunty Jackalope”) will see the first set of changes introduced by Canonical’s Desktop Experience Team: The much-discussed notify-osd notification system, and the indicator applet.

The idea came up to allow both developers and users to be able to choose between the “Ubuntuized” and a more “upstream-like” GNOME experience.  Martin Pitt (maintainer) has  called that “stracciatella GNOME session”, after the favourite kind of ice cream which is mostly vanilla (GNOME), but with some brown chocolate chips (Ubuntu modifications) in it.

To enable this feature simply run the following:

apt-get install gnome-stracciatella-session

and select the “GNOME (without Ubuntu specific components)” session in gdm.

In Jaunty or Karmic, this will suppress the messaging indicator and flip back to the classical GNOME notification-daemon again.  Martin Pitt plans to keep stracciatella-session up to date with new developments in future Ubuntu releases as well.

Ubuntu 9.04 introduces a change to the handling of package updates, launching update-manager directly instead of displaying a notification icon in the GNOME panel. Users will still be notified of security updates on a daily basis, but for updates that are not security-related, users will only be prompted once a week.Users who wish to continue receiving update notifications in the previous manner can restore the earlier behavior using the following command:

gconftool -s –type bool /apps/update-notifier/auto_launch false

For those who use Ubuntu’s inclusion of Tomboy notes, the easiest way to synchronize and share your notes automatically with all your Ubuntu computers is by using your Ubuntu One account rather than WebDAV or SSH. Ubuntu One is a Dropbox type of service by Canonical.

Continue reading ‘Sync Tomboy Notes with UbuntuOne’ »

Simply run the command:

sudo modprobe -r pcspkr

or you can set it as a persistent change by adding the module to your system driver blacklist, available at:

/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

simply append the line “blacklist pcspkr” for that driver to be disregarded at every boot.

If you have installed the KDE desktop on top of Ubuntu or the other way around, you may want to switch from gdm to kdm, or from kdm to gdm. This is an easy thing to do.

Open a terminal window and type in the following command:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure gdm

Hit enter at the OK prompt, and then you can switch between the two easily.

rxvt-unicode (commonly called urxvt) already has 88 color support, and for most things, this is fine. But sometimes you just want a tad more, maybe for vim color themes.

So here’s my build log of compiling rxvt-unicode with the 256 color patch on Ubuntu Hardy, and debianizing (packaging) it.

Continue reading ‘Get rxvt-unicode with 256 color support on Ubuntu’ »

Just a quick post here. I recently recompiled screen with vertical split support on Ubuntu 8.04. Here’s how you do it:

Install dependencies to build screen
sudo apt-get build-dep screen
# Create an area to hold the source
cd ~/debian-src
mkdir screen
cd screen

# Get the source
apt-get source screen

# Apply vertical split patch
cd screen-4.0.3/
wget http://vsp4sdl.yuggoth.org/wrp_vertical_split_0.3_4.0.2.diff.bz2
bunzip2 wrp_vertical_split_0.3_4.0.2.diff.bz2
patch -p1 < wrp_vertical_split_0.3_4.0.2.diff

# Build it!
dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc -rfakeroot
cd ..

# Install it!
sudo dpkg -i screen_4.0.3-0.4ubuntu2_amd64.deb