Read/write support for ext2/ext3 filesystems in Windows

I have been dual booting for a long time, and my shared fat32 partition always gave me trouble. It couldn’t handle two-extension file types like .tar.gz, and I just didn’t like it very much. I recently found this program which enables read/write support on ext2 and ext3 filesystems for Windows. As far as I can tell, it works seamlessly, and is a breeze to install and set up. Now my partitions are set up as follows:

sda1: ntfs windows
sda2: shared ext3 for files/music (/media/data)
sda3: ext3 for linux filesystem (/)
sda4: ext3 for home directory (/home)

I would recommend this program for anyone dual booting their computer with Windows and Linux. You can visit it’s home page here.

Install .rpm packages in ubuntu and any other debian-based distribution

Some programs are only available in .rpm format, so this howto will show you how to convert them into .deb packages so that we can install them on our debian based system.

First we need to update our sources and install the package “alien” which will convert our .rpm into a .deb:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install alien

When that’s done, find your .rpm on your harddrive and enter this command into a terminal, changing the path of where your .rpm is.

sudo alien -i /path/to/package.rpm

This command will convert your .rpm to a .deb and then install it automatically. If you don’t want alien to automatically install and you wish to have the .deb so you can install it manually, then just leave off the “-i” in the above command. It will place a .deb with the same name into your home directory.

Change the color of your username in the terminal in ubuntu

Oftentimes when I run a command that outputs a lot of text it is difficult to see the top of it. This will show you how to change the color of your username in gnome-terminal so that you can more easily see divisions between commands. This is quite a lot easier than it looks.

To do this we need to edit the ~/.bashrc file.

sudo gedit ~/.bashrc

Now look for the line that says:

# Comment in the above and uncomment this below for a color prompt

Now you need to comment out (#) the line ABOVE it that begins with PS1, and uncomment (remove the #) the line BELOW it that also begins with PS1.

Once you do this, you need to save the file, and restart gnome-terminal. It’s that simple. You should now see your username in gnome-terminal like normal, only colored. You can change its color by going to Edit, Current Profile, going to the colors tab, and changing the various colors on the bottom of the dialog box.

Create custom keyboard shortcuts in ubuntu (also for multimedia keys)

If you’re like me, you like to open your programs and run with keyboard shortcuts rather than clicking on an icon in the toolbar. It’s much faster and keeps your desktop & toolbars less cluttered. This method can also get your multimedia buttons on your laptop/keyboard working in gnome if the music player you’re using has commands for play, pause, etc. To find out, type the name of your music player and then –help, e.g. “amarok –help” (EDIT: Those are two dashes, not one big dash. WordPress automatically converts two dashes into that other dash character, which won’t work.)

First open a terminal and run gconf-editor. Then browse to apps/metacity/keybinding_commands. Here, you can enter up to 12 commands that will correspond to 12 different keyboard shortcuts that you will define in the next step. For example, for command_1 I have “gnome-terminal” and for command_2 I have “firefox” which opens my firefox browser.

Next we need to define the keyboard shortcuts that are used to activate the commands we set up in the previous step. In gconf-editor, browse to apps/metacity/global_keybindings and enter the keyboard shortcuts you would like to correspond to the commands that you entered previously. For example, for run_command_1 I have “<Mod4>t” which runs command_1 which is gnome-terminal, therefore opening a Gnome terminal window. Continue through the rest of the commands you defined earlier.

In case you were wondering, “<Mod4>” is the name of my start menu button on my keyboard. I prefer to use it for keyboard shortcuts since it’s useless for anything else. To use your start button like I do for keyboard shortcuts, go to System, Preferences, Keyboard, then go to the Layout Options tab, then go to the Alt/Win key behavior section, and make sure “Super is mapped to the Win-keys (default)” is selected. Now you should be able to use the “<Mod4>” name for your start button. If not, you can still use ctrl + alt + or similar. Just follow the syntax of the other shortcuts. For example, if you wanted Ctrl+Alt+f to start firefox, you would enter <ctrl><alt>f in the run_command_x box that corresponds to the command_x box that you entered “firefox” into in the last step.

If you don’t know the names of your multimedia/shortcut buttons you can open up System, Preferences, Keyboard Shortcuts, setting them to something to find out their names, disabling them again, and typing the names you found out in gconf-editor.

Turn off annoying touchpad tap-to-click or change the touch sensitivity in ubuntu

[update] Since gutsy, touchpad options have been included in the Touchpad tab of the Mouse preferences window. To find them, go to System > Preferences > Mouse, and then click on the “Touchpad” tab. You can then simply uncheck “Enable mouse clicks with touchpad.”

I don’t know if this bothers everyone, but I always seem to accidentally hit my touchpad when I’m typing, putting the cursor somewhere else while I’m still typing. This can be very frustrating. So I just turned off the tap-click “feature” of my Synaptics touchpad.

Before we start, it is important to make a backup of the file we are going to edit. If you make a mistake it is possible that your desktop environment will not start. So, open a terminal (Applications, Accessories, Terminal) and run the following command:

sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.backup_touchpad

If you do make a mistake and end up without a desktop environment (X won’t start) then simply hit ctrl+alt+F1 to get to a virtual terminal and run the following commands:

sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf.backup_touchpad /etc/X11/xorg.conf
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart

You should probably write down the above commands if you don’t know what they mean.

Now that we’ve backed up the file, we can edit it:
sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Next find the Synaptics Touchpad Section. It will look something like this:

Section “InputDevice”
Identifier “Synaptics Touchpad”
Driver “synaptics”
Option “SendCoreEvents” “true”
Option “Device” “/dev/psaux”
Option “Protocol” “auto-dev”
EndSection

Simply add the following line before “EndSection” just like the other options:
Option "MaxTapTime" "0"

Save the file (Ctrl+S) and restart your X server by hitting Ctrl+Alt+Backspace, and tap-to-click should be disabled.

If you want to just make it less sensitive, increase the value from 0.

Change touchpad movement sensitivity in ubuntu

Before we start, it is important to make a backup of the file we are going to edit. If you make a mistake it is possible that your desktop environment will not start. So, open a terminal (Applications, Accessories, Terminal) and run the following command:

sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.backup_touchpad

If you do make a mistake and end up without a desktop environment (X won’t start) then simply hit ctrl+alt+F1 to get to a virtual terminal and run the following commands:

sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf.backup_touchpad /etc/X11/xorg.conf
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart

You should probably write down the above commands if you don’t know what they mean.

Now that we backed up our xorg.conf file, we can get down to editing it. Run this command in a terminal:

sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Now find the place where it says something similar to:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier  "Synaptics Touchpad"
Driver      "synaptics"
Option        "SendCoreEvents" "true"
Option        "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option        "Protocol" "auto-dev"
EndSection

Add the following options before the “EndSection” text:

Option        "MinSpeed" "0.1"
Option        "MaxSpeed" "0.3"
Option        "AccelFactor" "0.0017"

Save the file and then restart X. You can restart X quickly with Ctrl + Alt + Backspace.

For more information about synaptic touchpads and more tweaking options check out this wiki.