To re-enable the ctrl+alt+backspace behavior you need to edit two files. This will enable the setting for all distros with a  Xorg Server version 1.6.0 and lower.

Edit the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file as root. Add the section:

Section "ServerFlags"
Option "DontZap" "false"
EndSection

For Karmic Koala, with Xorg 1.6.3, you need to edit a second file. Edit the file /etc/hal/fdi/policy/10-keymap.fdi as root and add the line:

<merge key="input.xkb.options" type="string">terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp</merge>

That will do the trick.

It you are uncomfortable with all these editing, you can simply do it the Lifehacker way.

Go to System > Preferences > Keyboard Settings. Look for the Layouts tab, expand the “Key sequence to kill the X server”, click the check box next to “Control + Alt + Backspace”. See the post at Lifehacker here.

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Create a chat server/Client:

Netcat can be used to create a chat server and client. With netcat, we can setup a computer as a chat server and another as a chat client which would connect to that server. This enables chatting between two computers on a network.

To create a chat server, enter this into a terminal:

nc –l –p ‘port_number’

This will set up a tcp server on the host at the port specified as ‘port_number’. This makes netcat listen to the specified port and relays the incoming message on the terminal with stdout. Connect to the chat server using:

nc ‘server_ip’ ‘port_number’c

Now, any connection made to the server on the specified port will set up a chat client through the terminal with stdin.

If you are on a Mac, use only the –l switch to create a chat server. So, your command should look like:

nc –l ‘port_number’

Connecting to the chat server on a Mac is the same as given above.

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To generate the sources.list visit the Ubuntu Sources List Generator homepage. This is a PHP application and is very comprehensive.

Ubuntu-Sources-list-generator

There are options to select the application as well as the source, separately. Sources for third party applications like Skype, Opera and Vuze can also be added. This gives us a complete sources.lst file. On hitting the generate button, the application provides us with the sources.lst file and the GPG keys, which need to be added manually.

Save the text provided as a sources.list file and replace the file at /etc/apt/sources.list with the new file.

Add the GPG keys and then update your packages at synaptics package manager. You should have new packages and applications in your package manager as well as in the Software Center after reloading the package list.

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Rotate all images recursively in a directory:

This script rotates all images recursively in a directory. This rotates the images in the directory and any image in the subdirectory as well. The only disadvantage is that it rotates in one direction only.

Script Link

Depends on: jhead

Resize images:

This script is used to resize and compress images in a directory. This is a very handy tool for bloggers and for uploading images to the web.

Script Link

Depends on: zenity, imagemagick

Rotate-Mirror images:

This script rotates images by 90°, 180°, 270°, vertical mirror and horizontal mirror. Also, this script makes the changes directly on the image being modified and deletes all earlier exif data. It cannot edit files in a directory but can edit multiple file selections.

Script Link

Depends on: zenity, imagemagick

Convert to jpeg:

With this script, we can convert all selected files to .jpeg images. The quality of the image is set to 75; you can set it to a higher value for a better quality. The maximum value is 100.

Script Link

Depends on: convert, sed

SVG to PNG:

This script converts images from svg to png format. This script like the rotate images script cannot convert files in a directory with directory selection but works on multiple files.

Script Link

Depends on: zenity, inkscape

Save the script-text as a file into the nautilus directory and make it executable. These scripts will fail to work without the respective dependencies. The dependencies can be installed from the package manager or from the apt-get command line utility. For details on using the script, see this earlier post on nautilus scripts.

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Using the  power button to shut down a frozen system can severely affect your Linux installation, specially if you initiated the shut down when data was being written into the hard disk.

Linux has an option for a safe restart or shutdown.

Hold down Alt+Sytem requirement. If you are using a laptop with the system requirement accessible through the function keys, use the Alt+Fn+Sys Req combination.

To restart, type REISUB in one go.

To shut down, type REISUO in one go.

What it does:

With every keypress of REISUB or REISUO, you initiate an action.

R: Switch the keyboard from raw mode to XLATE mode

E: Send the SIGTERM signal to all processes except init

I: Send the SIGKILL signal to all processes except init

S: Sync all mounted filesystems

U: Remount all mounted filesystems in read-only mode

B/O: Immediately reboot/shut down the system, without unmounting partitions or syncing

This comes in handy as even the ctrl+alt+backspace  combination fails to respond in some situations.

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I had covered installing Wifi on Ubuntu for Atheros Wifi cards earlier in this post.

Wifi-broadcom

To install Wifi for Broadcom on Ubuntu, follow the steps below.

If you have a working Internet connection of any form, other than the non-functional Wifi, you can select to install the package named b43-fwcutter, which will do the Wifi driver installation along with the installation of the package itself. Your Wifi should work fine after a restart.

If you  do not have a working Internet connection, then download these two files [ wl_apsta and broadcom-wl ].

Now, open a terminal and install the driver with the commands,

sudo b43-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware wl_apsta-3.130.20.0.o
tar xfvj broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2
sudo b43-fwcutter --unsupported -w /lib/firmware broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0/kmod/wl_apsta_mimo.o

Finally, restart your computer to verify if the Wifi is installed.

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There was a previous workaround which allowed us to use more than 3GB of ram in Linux by installing the server Kernel. This provided us with a kernel which had PAE enabled. This could also be done by recompiling the Linux kernel with PAE enabled. But, this is no longer possible now as the i386-server flavor of Linux is being dropped according to the Ubuntu Wiki.

Thankfully, instead many OEM’s have made a request for a 32-bit Ubuntu with PAE enabled. In response to this, Karmic Koala has options to use PAE. This has been possible due to the meta package linux-generic-pae, which has been added to the Karmic Koala build and allows us to enable PAE for the desktop version.

To enable more than 3 GB, enter this in a terminal. This command will install the PAE packages.

sudo apt-get install linux-generic-pae

Now after restarting the sytem, your Ubuntu should use the full RAM resource of your computer.

For more information on PAE, see the Wikipedia page here.

For more information on meta packages, see the Ubuntu help page here.

[ Via Web Upd8 ]

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Save under a different file-name:

Sometimes we may wish to save files under a different filename like when the filename of the file being saved is not the correct filename. In such situations, the filename can be changed using:
wget -O newname.ext "download link"
Here newname.ext is the desired filename and download link is the link to the file being downloaded.

Specify download rate:

Wget uses the full network bandwidth available which might cause trouble if you are browsing along with the download in progress. To limit download speed and save bandwidth for other applications use this method:

wget --limit-rate=50k "download link"

This limits the download rate to 50 KBps.

Resume download:

What is a download manager without resume support! Wget has resume support which can be used as:

wget -c "download link"

This will resume the download of the file from the last downloaded part.

FTP Download:

Downloading from FTP servers is also possible with Wget. To download from FTP servers, follow this step:

wget --ftp-user=USERNAME --ftp-password=PASSWORD DOWNLOAD-URL

Download all files of a certain type:

Downloading all files of a certain type is easy with Wget.  All you need to do is type in:

wget -r -A.pdf http://url-to-webpage-with-pdfs/

where  you can replace A.pdf with A.jpeg to download all images, A.flv to download all videos etc.

Wget also shows a progress bar, download speed, downloaded amount and estimated remaining time. With all these features, Wget is surely the best download manager on Linux.

For a richer list, visit this post at thegeekstuff.com.

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Each application is rated by users and shows the number of times it has been downloaded by users. If you like something you see, you can install it on your machine with a single click, or simply download it for later installation. You can also sort the applications by name, popularity or ratings. Accompanied with user submitted screen shots and specifications, you are sure to find enough information about each app before downloading it to your computer.

In addition to finding applications, you can also find useful Firefox Add-ons and Codecs to use with Ubuntu.

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Now, Skype is easily available for windows, but it is not present in the default repositories  for Ubuntu Linux. To add Skype to your Ubuntu installation, here are three easy steps.

1. Run this command from the command line. This adds support for Mediubuntu repositories.
   sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/feisty.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list
2. This compound command adds the GPG key for Mediubuntu repositories.
   wget -q http://packages.medibuntu.org/medibuntu-key.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add - && sudo apt-get update
3. This third and last command, installs Skype into your Ubuntu system.
   sudo aptitude install skype

If you had already enabled the Mediubuntu repositories,

you can execute this in the terminal to install Skype :

sudo apt-get install skype

This will install Skype into your system, which will be available under the Applications->Internet category.

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