Now I Know That Technical Thing Too

There are variety of reasons for wanting to setup a proxy connection on your machine. Getting this done on a Windows OS is simple, with tools like HMA! ( Hide My Ass! ) However, the surprise is it is quite easy to get it done on Ubuntu as well. This is for Ubuntu 18.10, I haven't really tried on another OS but the steps would remain the same. Do note that you will need a valid HMA username and password for this to work. There are 3 ways you can connect using HMA, I chose OpenVPN. Steps: First you need to setup OpenVPN on your machine if it is not available already     sudo apt-get install network-manager-openvpn-gnome Next you need the download the certificate and VPN config files from official HMA website          Download HMA VPN Configs Here! Save it in a folder on your machine and extract it. I prefer ~/vpn_HMA/     cd ~/     mkdir vpn_HMA/ Once you have the extracted folder in p...

I installed Linux Mint Qiana 17.2 on my (very old) Acer Aspire laptop. Was pretty surprised that I was not able to adjust the screen brightness using the laptop buttons. The hack I got was as follows, Open terminal (as a superuser) We now need gksudo to edit the grub file You can do gksudo gedit /etc/default/grub   In the text file that opens, look for the line which says GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="" In the empty quotes i.e. the "" insert the words "acpi_backlight=vendor" The line now looks like this GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="acpi_backlight=vendor" Remember to save before you close the file Back again in the terminal session, type sudo update-grub Reboot ACPI is Advanced Configuration and Power Interface It is used when the machine starts to control the amount of power given to each device attached to the computer. When we do acpi_backlight=vendor it tries to load vendor drivers before it tries the default generic driver for screen ...

I recently got a new laptop with Ubuntu 17.10 and a 14" screen. The screen is awesome and allows an awesome resolution of 1920 x 1080. However, this caused the fonts to appear very small. This small font issue was observed in, Titles of the windows The font  in general in several applications Browser, in my case Firefox You can do away with all the trouble by simply choosing a lower resolution. But, if you want the higher resolution minus all the font troubles, read ahead. After several trials and techniques, I finally found solutions that worked for me. Window Titles Settings -> Universal Access -> Large Text This would increase your font size of window titles and the OS UI. Applications Several applications will by default show small fonts. Adjust them as per your liking using their respective preferences. Kate Editor ( Version 17.04 ) Settings -> Configure Kate -> Fonts & Colors -> Font Choose the font size you prefer. Konsole ( Ve...

Usually we install a package on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS using the apt-get command (or the Ubuntu Software Center) and we have the application available to us via the Dash Search Icon with all the necessary binaries in the user PATH. However, some applications are not bundled as apt packages and we need to install them ourselves. In this case, one major issue is that of not having a launcher icon and not having the binary in user PATH. Let's see the example of manual PHP Eclipse i.e. PDT installation You need to be root user for this, I usually keep manually installed applications in /opt directory Download eclipse package using wget or using your browser https://eclipse.org/pdt/#download cd /opt/ mkdir php_eclipse cd php_eclipse cp -rf eclipse-php-mars-1-linux-gtk-x86_64.tar.gz . tar -xvfz eclipse-php-mars-1-linux-gtk-x86_64.tar.gz Type eclipse in the Search bar and you can see your newly installed eclipse icon. Click on it and your application launches. cd eclipse The ...

TLDR;   Kate is one awesome editor ( If you don't like Vim for its 'CLI'ness ) When working from the command line we can use a handy tool ' xmllint ' to format XML files using its --format option. But it is a tedious task to use it when you have some content in Kate ( more so if it is an unsaved file ) and want to format it. Incase, you don't have xmllint installed, simply hit sudo apt-get install libxml2-utils and that will install it for you. If you use xmllint you would do something like this, Save File ( MySavedFile.xml ) Go to Command Line cat MySavedFile.txt | xmllint --format - > MySavedFile.txt and then reload our file in Kate . If you wish to remain in Kate and get this done then you would need to do, Select text ( Complete or Partial ) Hit ' Ctrl + \ '  or go to Tools -> Filter Text Incase your Kate does not have the option for 'Filter Text' under tools, you just need to enable the 'Text F...

I was stuck in this situation where I followed all applied instructions to install/activate Flash Plugin for Chromium (Version 37.0.2062.120 Ubuntu 12.04 (281580) (64-bit)) and Firefox (38.0.5) 1. Download corresponding version of Flash from Adobe Site: https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ 2. Untar and move data to corresponding directories. 3. For some reason, it didn't work. Then after lot of search, I came across this post (Link at end of the article). Basically, what was missing in my case was a symbolic link in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/ So basically what we do is, Download the package from https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ mkdir /usr/lib/flash-plugin/ if it does not exist Extract the downloaded tar.gz and copy libflashplayer.so to / usr/lib/flash-plugin Give chmod 775 /usr/lib/flash-plugin/libflashplayer.so Finally, the missing link in my case, cd /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/ ln -s /usr/lib/flash-plugin/libflashplayer.so . chmod 775 libflashplayer.so ...

It is better to know the size of a package before downloading it. At times, apt-get install prompts before downloading the package and we can read the size there. However sometimes dependencies are downloaded and then there is a prompt for the BIG package. But by now some packages are already installed and if the BIG package is rejected because of slow bandwidth etc. an extra effort is to be made to clean the unnecessary packages too.( apt-get autoremove does it too. But, it is extra effort after all)   What we can do is this, apt-cache --no-all-versions show $package | grep '^Size: '   E.g: apt-cache --no-all-versions show qtoctave | grep '^Size: ' Size: 3891520 The size is in bytes. Ubunut Version: 12.04 LTS