Linux Mint 12: More post installation tasks
Wednesday, May 16th, 2012 | Linux, Tech-savvy | No Comments
I started to write down my personal Linux Mint post installation tasks as of version 10. After installing a few Mint 12 machines I had to update the list. As always, highly personal, take whatever info might be useful, ignore the rest.
- Add favorite programs to autostart
- Disable extension overkill
- Install VirtualBox with USB support
- Use the users group as the default group
- Increase history size
GNOME 3 has no point-and-click tool to add autostart options, at least no default shortcut for it. Alt-F2 and gnome-session-properties does the trick. I have essentials like my browser, media player and ssh-add in my autostart.
Whether you use MATE, GNOME 3 or Cinnamon is up to you. I kinda like the new GNOME, but not all the default “extensions” that come with Mint 12 extend my user experience in a good way 
I decided the following options work the best for me:
Well, installing VirtualBox is a little confusing, as you have multiple versions (virtualbox-ose, -nonfree, -4.1) in your available software list. Some people suggest adding new repos and installing the latest version, I just stick to what’s being delivered by the default repos. Makes me feel better for some reason.
The VirtualBox site states that the “standard” installation names are the ones with the major version at the end, so I just went for the -4.1 (writing this 4.1.14 is the latest stable, the official Mint repos provide 4.1.6, yeah, whatever…)
If you want USB support you have to add the appropriate extension pack. Go to http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/ and get it for your installed version. You also have to make all users that want to use VirtualBox members of the vboxusers group. As there is no GNOME 3 default group editor simply open a shell and enter
nick $ sudo adduser username vboxusersYour group memberships will be updated the next time you log in.
Finally, add USB devices in your VBox config’s USB section (select the desired machine, click “Change”, choose “USB”). After that you should be ready to go. What a drag.
I share my computer. I share a lot of files, like pictures and stuff. I don’t like that my user – nick – also has his primary group called “nick”. So ownership of files is nick:nick. This makes little sense to me and I’d rather have it like this: nick:users and nickswife:users so that I can easily access the same files as my picture taking wingman. So issue
nick $ sudo usermod -g users username
for each user that should have the “users” group as the default group. (The sticky bit approach cd /our/pics; chgrp -R users .; find . -type d -exec chmod 2770 {} \;; find . -type f -exec chmod 660 {} \;was not sufficient for me, by using the same primary group I hope we won’t have any permission troubles in the future again)
Remember that wicked command you entered a few weeks ago? No? Increase your history size to something that lives up to the term “history”. Open your ~/.bashrc and enter something like export HISTFILESIZE=10000
That’s it for today. Have phun!
Temporarily switching X desktop resolution
Monday, April 16th, 2012 | Linux, Tech-savvy | No Comments
My experience with multi-monitor environments in Linux is that it can be quite tedious to set up. You may not agree and have no issues, lucky you!
Currently I have a 24″ screen as the “main” screen and right of it my laptop display, mainly for displaying logs and stuff. Anyway, every time I boot my system without the monitor everything seems fine, except my system still thinks I have the space of the non-existing monitor available. So sometimes apps open at their former location naturally being off-screen now … Alt-F7 to the rescue? Not really. I recently wanted to show some robot tests to a client that all opened and closed off-screen … well, at least they were all green
Anyway, Google is my friend and told me about xrandr (the X resize, rotate and reflect extension)
Xrandr is used to set the size, orientation and/or reflection of the outputs for a screen. It can also set the screen size.
Well, every screen setup that comes with your favourite *nix flavour is able to change resolution, right? Still, xrandr became my weapon of choice because it does not touch your X config and it works on the fly, no need to restart your whole X session. Next time you fire up your system (or X respectively) everything is back to normal. Neat.
There’s even a little GUI available, just try sudo apt-get install lxrandr (developed for LXDE, works fine with GNOME 3 as well). I tried this with Mint 12 x86_64 GNOME 3. If you have similar issues and – maybe better – solutions, drop a comment. I heard a colleague of mine is using several X configs to choose from depending on the desired environment. From my perspective the whole screen setup / multi monitor / beamer handling is one thing that works a lot less painful in Windoze environments… *sigh*
Neeks Amp should not be lost in oblivion
Tuesday, February 28th, 2012 | Gadgets, Tech-savvy | 1 Comment
Remember the times when mp3 was brand new, sounded terrible and it took almost an hour to encode a 3 minute song? Those were the days 
The de-facto mp3 player of the time was Winamp – my favourite one was 2.81 (@see oldversion.com for some nostalgia). I’ve been using Winamp ever since on all my Windoze installations, now that I use Linux I fell in love with Audacious which supports Winamp themes. I just don’t like bloated media players …
Back in the days I had a favourite skin that was always a pain in the arse to search for. Neeks Amp. There are at least two versions out there and I used to have a hard time finding the right one. So here is a little blog post for me to never look for Neeks Amp again and maybe make somebody else’s day as well.
Audacious provides a few nice skins out of the box and because I did not have Neeks Amp at hand I chose Refugee as my new default skin. Today I like it even better than the old skewl Neeks Amp, yet who knows, maybe I will be looking for Neeks Amp at some point in the future again. Now I know where I have to look.
So here is the file: NeeksAmp.zip – just unzip it to /usr/share/audacious/Skins and make sure you enable the option “allow loading of incomplete skins” in your Audacious settings. (Seems the original artist did not “implement” the full Winamp skin spec )
Five toys I’d like to call my own
Monday, February 27th, 2012 | Gadgets, Misc, Tech-savvy | 4 Comments
“Honey, we pretty much have everything now …”
I just have to share my thoughts on things I’d like to have yet cannot purchase for reasons such as money, time, sanity and the like. › Continue reading
Mint 12 (/Ubuntu): Set up Java alternatives
Saturday, February 18th, 2012 | Java, Linux, Tech-savvy | 1 Comment
Your modern Linux distro will provide you with a more or less decent Java setup by default. Mint 12 comes with a Sun JDK 1.6.0.26 pre-installed. To switch between installed versions of your Java runtime use the
update-java-alternatives --listcommand to list installed alternatives and
update-java-alternatives --set alternativeto switch them. If you still want to have different versions of the JDK you can always download them manually, untar and use them directly. So far so good.
I wanted to be able to switch my downloaded JDKs as easy as the pre-installed ones, so I was looking for a way to add my JDKs to my system’s repository. So here is how it’s done (it’s basically a copy of a nice post I found, I just wanted to spread the knowledge) – it’s a bit painful but made me feel quite good when I was done 
› Continue reading
eclipse essentials: Grep Console plug-in
Friday, February 17th, 2012 | IDE, Java, Tech-savvy | No Comments
Every time I set up a mint eclipse I am wondering why an IMHO essential feature is missing: a configurable coloured console.
I like stacktraces to be red and “JBoss started” messages to be bold. I like the important log entry you are looking for to be highlighted with a yellow background.
All this bliss is provided by a very nice plug-in I’ve been using for years: Grep Console.
Using it is very easy and intuitive. Just select the desired text part in your standard console output, right-click and choose “Add Grep Expression”.
You can add colour and format information for background & font of the matching expression or the whole line.
That’s basically it, there is not much more to say, yet sometimes it’s the simple things that make us happy, right?
Go get your Grep Console using this URL as your eclipse update site: http://eclipse.musgit.com
Mint 12: Hide unwanted devices in Nautilus
Friday, February 10th, 2012 | Linux, Tech-savvy | No Comments
My laptop consists of quite a few partitions, different OSs and file systems. Nautilus displays everything that will be mounted to /media as a device in the places sidebar. This became an annoyance, because I really don’t need to see my Win7 system partition and my old Mint 10 partitions on a regular basis. I tried the easy way: right-click on an item and say “remove” or something – naaat!
I was looking for an easy solution and came across some pretty old forum posts and workarounds that simply don’t work (any more). Here is how I managed to get rid of the unwanted device entries fairly easily: you simply have to explicitly mount the unwanted volumes and use a folder other than /media – basically /mnt will do. This way you don’t have the unwanted file systems listed in Nautilus directly yet can access them easily by navigating to /mnt/mountpoint.
Step by step:
- open nautilus
- mount all unwanted files systems by selecting them one after another
- open a terminal
- list mounted devices
nick@mintbox ~ $ mount
- look for the entries that resemble the unwanted files systems
- write down the /dev/sdx and type attributes
- create mountpoints for each device in in /mnt
nick@mintbox ~ $ sudo mkdir /mnt/exampleMountPoint1 nick@mintbox ~ $ sudo mkdir /mnt/exampleMountPoint2
- open fstab
nick@mintbox ~ $ sudo gedit /etc/fstab
- add a fstab entry for each device (first is a Win NTFS partition, second a ext4 Linux one)
/dev/sda6 /mnt/exampleMountPoint1 ntfs-3g defaults 0 0 /dev/sda7 /mnt/exampleMountPoint2 ext4 defaults 0 0
That should do the trick.
Treasures of the toolbox: SequoiaView / GdMap
Tuesday, February 7th, 2012 | Gadgets, Linux, Tech-savvy | No Comments
A few years ago I stumbled across a tool (SequoiaView) that graphically displays the contents of your hard drive using a so called cushion treemap. It’s a fast and easy way to get an overview of your (probably messed up) file system.
This is one of the gems I considered part of my Swiss “computer tools” army knife.
Now that I use Linux as my desktop OS I had to find an alternative to this Windows-only tool. Luckily there are quite a few similar tools available for Linux. I am pretty happy using GdMap.
So, whether you are using Windoze or Linux, try one of these cushion treemaps to get an idea how of your file system looks like from a distance. (…and get rid of these old ISO images in your temp dir )
Happy housekeeping!
A Studio Ghibli homage
Thursday, February 2nd, 2012 | Activities, Misc, Movies | 1 Comment
Today I invited Totoro to stay.
Ever since we moved into our “new” flat a few years ago we could not decide what to do with our living room walls. I suggested that we could try to draw the Studio Ghibli logo – namely Totoro – next to the TV. The other side of the telly got decorated with the beautiful postcards that come with the German Blu-ray edition of Arietty and Laputa. Now I feel like a true fanboy
And this is how I will enjoy my films from now on:
¡Hola Mexico! aka Our 2011 Xmas Retreat
Tuesday, January 24th, 2012 | Activities, Photography | 2 Comments
Mexico – a great place to escape the Xmas stress and general greyness of Germany in the winter. It’s almost unbelievable how many colours you miss getting out of a plane from Mexico … just look out of your window when you’re done flicking through these sample shots. Enjoy.
Regarding the post-processing – I feel like a cook that just learned about salt and pepper, so he applies a lot to each meal. Right now I like the style of punchy colours and unsharp masked pictures but I already feel that I am getting tired of these dishes … I’d like to experiment with thyme, oregano, parsley and what else the kitchen (RawTherapy/GIMP) has to offer. So much to learn …
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