Author: Gayan

‘Wake on LAN’ is a handy little feature that lets individuals like system administrators to turn-on a computer on their network by simply sending a message from their PC to the targeted computer’s Ethernet adapter. But in order for this to happen the Ethernet adapter has to keep it in a certain ‘awakened’ state (even when the computer is turned off) and it requires some power (it’s enabled by default by the Ethernet adapter). So if you have something like a laptop and don’t really need this feature then you can save some power by disabling it. Now I did…

‘Camorama’ is a lightweight application that you can use to capture images using your Webcam device. However, its limited functionality will disappoint some people (especially those who are addicted to ‘Cheese’ ;-)). So if you’re looking for another utility that has a lot of features but still doesn’t need a lot of system resources to run then you might wanna try ‘guvcview’. It lets you capture images, record videos (including audio!), change color settings and add effects to images and videos. It used about 12-13MB while running but when recording videos it can go as high as 40-42MB, but that’s…

While sitting in front of your computer if you kinda lose the track of time and think you’d be better of with an application that reminds you to get things done, then ‘Nudge’ is a simple utility that will come in handy (it does for me at least). Once opened it’ll run from the system tray area and will remind you about your manually entered upcoming ‘events’ by using notification messages as shown below. When you click on its icon (check mark) it opens up the main window which shows a list of current reminders and can also be used…

One drawback of removing PulseAudio in Ubuntu is that you’ll no longer be able to use the audio icon on the notification area (‘sound indicator’) for quickly accesing the mixer settings and applications that support it. As a result, whenever you want to mute or increase/decrease the audio levels or configure other advanced settings in ALSA, first you have to open its tool (‘alsa-mixer’) by clicking on the Dash etc … it can be hectic. So if you’re looking for a utility that gives you quick access to your Sound card through ALSA by using a system tray area icon…

It’s been like 4 years since I last tried ‘openSUSE’ and to be honest, I’ve never used it for longer periods either. But then again, the only GNU/Linux distributions that I’ve used in daily basis has always been ‘Fedora’ (started off with ‘Red Hat’) and of course ‘Ubuntu’. Anyway, openSUSE has an European origin (born in Germany) and like most of these Europe based distributions, it has always been in favor of the KDE desktop rather than Gnome, and their core system components like the installer for instance is also designed using the Qt toolkit (the user interface building toolkit…

‘apg’ is a command-line tool (very easy to use) that comes installed by default with Ubuntu that you can use to automatically generate large number of passwords with ease. It comes with two basic ‘modes’. You can use it to create more pronounceable passwords or, passwords that are difficult to remember (as they contain non common characters etc) but are a bit more secure than the pronounceable ones. The default mode will generate the pronounceable passwords and you can change things like … *. The minimum and maximum length of passwords. *. The amount of passwords to generate. *. Spell…

Learning how to use the command-line for copying files and folders (or backing up etc) in GNU/Linux sometimes can come in real handy. Because the GNU/Linux operating system is fundamentally designed and run through the command-line interface, thus even if your desktop fails to load, there’s a good chance that you should still be able to use the command-line to login to your user account and backup your data (supposing that you don’t have an Ubuntu Live CD/USB flash drive around :)). So if your desktop fails to load at the login screen and doesn’t takes you to a ‘login…

Newer optical disc drives are a lot more quieter than the old ones, but they too can make some ‘unnecessary’ noises while reading discs sometimes. For instance, few months ago I bought a portable (USB) CD/DVD burner, it’s lightweight, relatively quiet, spins down the discs quickly when not used, so in general, I’m quite happy with it. However, when watching some movies, the drive reads the discs at higher speeds and even though the movies should be watchable (no buffering errors etc) without having to spin it up to such higher rates, so after the disc is mounted (opened by…

In the recent past, Gnome desktop used to come with a package called ‘xscreensaver’. It’s a screensaver program that has few built in screensavers (including some third-party created beautiful looking 2D & 3D ones too) and it was used by Gnome, KDE and other desktops (some still do) as well. But later, Gnome developers decided to replace it with a package of their own called the ‘gnome-screensaver (KDE also has a tool of their own). Now to be honest, I don’t know much about this package, and ironically it’s called ‘gnome-screensaver’, but other than locking and dimming the screen, it…

If you’re having screen flickering issues while playing videos in Ubuntu, then the below steps might help you to fix it. In my case, I have an Intel HD 3000 GPU (ain’t gonna win any gaming contests!) and few days ago I noticed that whenever I’m playing a video file using ‘Totem’ (default media player in Ubuntu/Gnome-desktop) the screen started to flicker here and there, and it drove me mad!. Interestingly, then I used my favorite media player, the ‘MPLayer’, and it played these videos without any issues whatsoever. So I thought, perhaps it has something to do with ‘Gstreamer’…

It’s true that Ubuntu (or GNU/Linux in general) is getting better and better at managing power usage under different hardware platforms. For instance, when comparing with older versions, 12.04 Precise Pangolin manages power consumption really well in my Dell Vostro V131 laptop (Intel Sandy Bridge based notebook), and I get a battery life similar to under Windows 7 that came pre-installed with it. However, after installing Ubuntu, I usually install another tool called ‘Laptop-Mode-Tools’, a set of utilities (configuration files) that try to minimize the unnecessary power consumptions of your computer’s hardware. And ‘LMT’ further reduces like 0.8 Watts to…

In GNU/Linux, because almost all the major desktop environments come with some sort of a system monitor, killing or terminating a hung up process is pretty easy. However, you can also use few built in command-line based tools for achieving the same task, and once you get used to it, most of the time, it’s actually extremely easy too!. Also, even if you’re someone new, then having a basic understanding or learning few of these commands will not only come in handy, but most importantly, according to my personal experience, even after knowing few basic but important commands, have always…