News, Tutorials, Howtos for Ubuntu Linux
Unity is the default desktop environment since Ubuntu 11.04 Natty.
This tutorial shows how to disable the global menu, so that each application having its own menu bar on Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy.
Before:
After:
To do it, press Ctrl+Alt+T on your keyboard to open terminal. When it opens, run the commands below to disable it.
sudo apt-get remove indicator-appmenu
Restart your computer to apply the changes.
For Firefox, go to Tools –> Add-ons –> Extensions and disable ‘Global Menu Bar integration’.
Enjoy!
This simple and brief tutorial is going to show you how to speed up your snail-slow laptop by tweaking your Ubuntu system. There’re some tools and apps to improve the overall performance of an Ubuntu powered machine. They are really helpful if you have an old machine with the hardware that are out of date.
Improve Performance with ZRAM on low RAM machines:
ZRAM is a is a module of the Linux kernel that creates a RAM based block device which acts as a swap disk, but is compressed and stored in memory instead of swap disk (which is slow), allowing very fast I/O and increasing the amount of memory available before the system starts swapping to disk.
This gives amazing performance improvements on systems with low RAM. Especially netbooks! Search for and install zram-config from Ubuntu Software Center. Then restart, zram is running silently as a background process.
Speed up application loading time by using Preload
Preload is nice little application that could make your linux system a lot faster. Preload is an adaptive readahead daemon. It monitors applications that users run, and by analyzing this data, predicts what applications users might run, and fetches those binaries and their dependencies into memory for faster startup times.
Preload is available by default in Ubuntu Software Center. Just search for and install it, then it’ll run silently as a background process. If you want to further tweak Preload, conf file is available at /etc/preload.conf.
Speed up Unity desktop by disable graphics effect:
Unity 2D has been dropped since Ubuntu 12.04, it’s no longer available in higher editions. If you’re using Ubuntu with Unity as its desktop environment, you can turn off the graphics effect to get a better experience.
To do so, create file .xprofile on user Home folder and open it with text editor (You may check if it already exist by press Ctrl+H to view hidden files). Add below line and save it:
export UNITY_LOW_GFX_MODE=1
That’s it. Hope this tutorial may help you!
Tooltips on Ubuntu Unity by default is white on black. This tutorial shows how to easily change the both background and foreground colors.
Objectives:
To get started, install the simple tool Gnome Color Chooser from Ubuntu Software Center.
Open it from the Unity Dash. Navigate to Specific tab, there you’ll find the option to tweak the tooltips colors.
That’s it. Enjoy!
When you’re running your laptop on battery, Ubuntu dims the screen after a few seconds of inactivity. It annoying and here’s how to increase the timeout.
Objectives:
To get started, open dconf Editor from the dash search results.
In next window, navigate to org -> gnome -> settings-daemon -> plugins -> power. You’ll find the key which says “idle-dim-time”, change its value to what you want.
Enjoy!
When your Ubuntu laptop is on battery, the screen dims after about a few seconds of inactivity. It’s annoying and here’s how to turn if off.
Objectives:
To get started, open Brightness & Lock utility from Unity Dash search results or from System Settings.
Un-check the box where it says “Dim screen to save power”
That’s it!
UltraStar Deluxe is a free video singing game. It allows up to six players to sing along with music using microphones in order to score points, depending on the pitch of the voice and the rhythm of singing.
The UltraStar Deluxe official ppa repository is not available for Ubuntu 13.04. You can install the DEBs for Ubuntu 12.04 and it runs well on my laptop with 32-bit system.
To download the DEBs, you may check 32-bit or 64-bit by going to top-right shutdown menu and choose ‘About This Computer’.
Then download UltraStar Deluxe Deb for 32-bit or 64-bit, and date package.
After that, press Ctrl+Alt+T to open a terminal window:
Install downloaded package via below command:
sudo dpkg -i ~/Downloads/ultrastar-deluxe*.deb; sudo apt-get -f install
Enjoy!
Did you ever get the Unlock Login Keyring prompt that says “The login keyring did not get unlocked when you logged into your computer” or “The password you use to login to your computer no longer matches that of your login keyring”.
There’re two reasons. One is you are set to auto-login, the other is the login password was changed to different to your keyring password.
Objectives:
Open Passwords and Keys utility from Unity Dash.
In next window menu, go to View -> tick By keyring. So that you get the sidebar. Right click on Login and choose Change Password.
Input original password (the password you set when user created), set new password to be the same as your Ubuntu login password.
For auto-login user, set new keyring password to none by leaving it empty.
DownVerter is a popular Youtube downloader which also has the ability to convert videos to MP3, M4A, MPEG, 3GP, OGG and other formats. It’s free!
Objectives:
To get started, download DEB package from the official site. You may check 32-bit or 64-bit via ‘Details’ utility.
Then press Ctrl+Alt+T to open terminal.
Run below command to install the package:
sudo dpkg -i ~/Downloads/downverter*.deb
That’s it. The installed executable script is /opt/downverter/Downverter. But Ubuntu keeps looking for /opt/downverter/downverter when you open Downverter from Unity Dash. To fix this problem, run below commands to rename it:
sudo mv /opt/downverter/Downverter /opt/downverter/downverter
Then give executable permission:
sudo chmod +x /opt/downverter/downverter
Enjoy!
This tutorial shows how to enable or customize your login sound on Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail. This can be done by adding a startup application.
Objectives:
To get started, open ‘Startup Applications’ utility from Unity dash search results.
In next window, click ‘Add’ button to add a program to start at login. Then give a name, comment, and command to play the sound file.
To play the classic gnome login sound, use below in command area. Change the value of “–volume” to turn up / down.
/usr/bin/canberra-gtk-play --id="desktop-login" --description="play login sound" --volume=10
To play a custom sound, install mplayer (Movie player for Unix-like systems), then type following in command area:
mplayer path/to/your/sound/file/name
For example, I have Hello-Moto.mp3 in my Music folder. The file path is /home/handbook/Music/Hello-Moto.mp3, where handbook is my username. So I use:
mplayer /home/handbook/Music/Hello-Moto.mp3
Ubuntu desktop keeps going blank or dark when it is idled for a certain time. That’s not good if you’re watching movies on screen. Here’s the guide to stop your screen being turned off.
Open Brightness & Lock from Unity dash search results, or from System Settings
You’ll see the window as the below picture shown. Select “Never” in the drop-down box after where it says “Turn screen off when inactive for”.
That’s it! There also provides options to disable lock screen and dimming.
Enjoy!
