Most Ubuntu users prefer Software Center or synaptic for package management. Those who love the command-line definitely use apt all the time. In this article we will explore another package manager available in the default repos – xara. xara is written in GTK+ and has powerful capabilities. Continue reading xara: Debian package manager
noice is a minimal file browser for those who don’t like to type cd ... to reach a file, then open it; or one who doesn’t like to open a file browser and keep clicking to find and open a file. noice reduces the effort to pressing the arrow keys. Originally noice is written as a utility having minimal interactions with X. For example, image files are opened with feh. Considering most people use X and love to use to GUI apps when it makes sense, I have forked a branch with some changes of my own. Continue reading Hacking noice: fast cmdline file browser
Laptops with larger touchpad area pose a serious problem with typing. While we explored a way to reduce the effective touchpad area, sometimes turning off the touchpad is a better solution. The 14.04 way of setting synclient TouchpadOff to 0 or 1 doesn’t work on 16.04. So here’s a fresh technique with a little bit of scripting. Continue reading Toggle touchpad on Ubuntu 16.04
The 1.0 Beta release of the Lumina Desktop Environment made some news this week. While it is the flagship DE for PC-BSD, Lumina can be installed and used on many other distros as well. We’ll see how to install it on Ubuntu 15.10 (and link to the procedure for other distros) but a little about Lumina first. Continue reading Lumina DE: a fresh desktop to try out
This article is meant to be a short quickstart guide on using neovim on Ubuntu. neovim has been around for a while and we wanted to explore it as a vim alternative. We are on Ubuntu and the plan is to transfer all vim dependencies to neovim. Continue reading Getting started with neovim
Thunar 1.6.10 shipped with Ubuntu 16.04 (or upgraded on 15.10) has a nasty bug leading to a crash on file rename or move between tabs. There are several bugs on launchpad.net confirming this: #1512120, #1565951, #1572400. It’s an irritating issue and I was looking for a way to fix this. Seems like there’s already a patch from Harald Judt to take care of this. Continue reading Fix Thunar crash on move, rename (Xubuntu 16.04)
Have you noticed that different file manager apps provide different options to remove drives? You probably have sees the options unmount, eject and safely remove drives. In this article we’ll explore these options briefly and then hack a way to safety detach removable USB disk drives from a Linux system. Continue reading Safely remove drives from terminal
I noticed this issue on Xubuntu as well as Ubuntu Mate. Apps like Dropbox and HotShots would show a missing icon in the indicator (as in the image). The problem seems to be with Qt based applications and affects Ubuntu 14.10, 15.04, 15.10 and 16.04. Noticed the same problem on Voyager Linux 16.04 too. Here are some temporary solutions that work till the problem gets fixed. Continue reading Fix missing indicator icons on Xubuntu
Since my last experiments with KaOS, I had been looking forward to try another distro. Being a long-time user of LXDE, I picked up Manjaro LXQt. LXDE development has almost stopped and LXQt is indeed the way forward. Having it the Arch way would be exciting, I thought. Continue reading Manjaro LXQt 2016.03 & Ubuntu 14.04 on UEFI
Update: tsocks seems to be a better alternative when multiple applications are involved, i.e., one invokes another.
While there is a Tor-specific utility torify to route per-application traffic anonymously, the utility doesn’t provide any option to use custom proxies. ProxyChains fills in the gap by providing a similar but more flexible utility. It supports tor too. ProxyChains is extrremely useful when a program doesn’t handle proxies by itself. ProxyChains adds the functionality by intercepting the TCP calls. Continue reading ProxyChains: per-app proxy