Syam's Techy Notes

Monday, June 11, 2007

Sunday, May 27, 2007

Ubuntu Feisty Plugins for firefox

Install sun-java6-jre and sun-java6-plugin (for firefox): sudo aptitude install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin sun-java6-fonts
Install Flash player plugin for firefox
Install RealPlayer10. Download and chmod +x RealPlayer10GOLD.bin; sudo ./RealPlayer10GOLD.bin

sudo without entering a password!

Hate entering password every time you have to do some administration work? Do this. Not a secure thing. I do this because nobody else uses my computer.

sudo vsudo

Move cursor to the following line:

%admin ALL=(ALL) ALL

Change it to %admin ALL=NOPASSWD: ALL

Press Ctrl+X

Type Y to save

Press ENTER to confirm the file name.

That's all! Now you will not be asked for your password when you sudo.

Ubuntu does not ask for a root password on installation. Add a root password with sudo passwd root

Configuring Firewall in Feisty

Check for any open ports at Gibson Research Corporation's Shields Up tool

Before configuring firewall:

After sudo aptitude install firestarter and configuring firewall with it:

It is now very easy to search and install codecs for different media types in Ubuntu feisty. When you try to play a music file or video file, a confirmation box will appear asking whether to search for a codec.

Everything works fine now. Previously, in dapper, I used VLC player because of the codec problems in the default players. VLC is a very good media player which plays almost all formats. It is also available for windows platform.

Sunday, May 20, 2007

Time to go and sleep. Installing everything from Apache to xracer is postponed until next week...

Feisty Fawn Humour!

I installed Feisty Fawn. I got this message during the first boot up: " / has gone 49710 days without being checked, check forced". After checking, grub started again, but this time, it booted ok.

Installing Ubuntu 7.04, Feisty Fawn!

Ubuntu CDs came thursday. I made a decision to sacrifice my ubuntu 6.06 Long Term Support version for the new features in Feisty. I am going to make a clean install instead of upgrading.

First, I made a note of installed applications and the tweaks I made, then backed up important files to a FAT partition, put the CD into drive and rebooted.

It did boot up faster than the previous versions, but that's probably because I added more RAM two months ago. First thing I checked was firefox. It is the newest version (2.0.0.3). I clicked the install icon in the desktop and started the install process. When the partitioning part came, I selected manual partitioning and checked the partition where current ubuntu version is installed. Then I resized the partition to make more swap space. My partitions were like this:

hda1 fat32 104878 MB
hda5 ntfs 104878 MB (windows xp)
hda6 ext3 18885 MB (current ubuntu installation)
hda 7 swap 197 MB

I resized partition and made a 1GB swap space, then selected ext3 partition as /. Now installation is going on.

Thursday, May 03, 2007

Firefox: tweaks

Disable prefetching: set network.prefetch-next key to false.
Turn on spell-checking in input fields as well as textareas: set layout.spellcheckDefault to 2
(Windows OS only ? ) To Allow Windows to swap out memory when the program is minimized:create a new boolean config.trim_on_minimize and set it true
Set network.http.pipelining and network.http.proxy.pipelining to true
Set network.http.pipelining.maxrequests to 30

Wednesday, May 02, 2007

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

:-)

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Friday, April 06, 2007

Install Firefox New version on your Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake)
Install Firefox Ubuntu themes: sudo aptitude install firefox-themes-ubuntu
Prettify the Firefox widgets
Tweak Firefox (All platforms)

Friday, February 16, 2007

OpenDNS: OpenDNS is a better DNS, free to all. OpenDNS uses its distributed network of DNS servers to speed up your Internet experience, increase reliability, improve security and make DNS smarter for users all over the world.