Synecdoche

------ BOOTSPLASH --------- 1. http://www.64bitjungle.com/tag/boot-screen/ Usplash is the application that controls the boot splash, so I did a quick search in /etc for a conf file. Oddly enough, one exists, and it’s called usplash.conf . Running $ more /etc/usplash.conf # Usplash configuration file # These parameters will only apply after running update-initramfs. xres=1440 yres=900 2. I also edited the menu.lst file, in /boot/grub/ gksu gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst and changed the end of the “kernel” line for the default Linux image boot, removing “quiet”, and ensuring “splash” was also included: title Ubuntu 7.10, kernel 2.6.22-14-generic root (hd0,6) kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22-14-generic root=UUID=[Your UUID] ro splash initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.22-14-generic 3. Restore splash screen from Kubutu to ubuntu To get back your familiar Ubuntu usplash image and screen $sudo update-alternatives --config usplash-artwork.so $ sudo dpkg-reconfigure usplash update-initramfs: Generating /boot/i

http://www.devdaily.com/blog/post/latex/use-strikeout-strikethrough-font-with-latex Include the "ulem" package in the header like this. \documentclass[a4paper,12pt]{article} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{hyperref} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{ulem} % to use a strikeout/strikethrough font Then to produce strikeout use the command \sout{ ... } like this. \sout{Windows} Ubuntu rules. This produces output text like this: Windows Ubuntu rules. \sout command only works in text mode. To use strikeout in equations a different command should be used. Inside math mode the command \text{\sout{\ensuremath{ ... }}} should be used. Like this, \begin{eqnarray} \text{\sout{\ensuremath{R^{bc} = R^{00} + R^{BC} }}} \end{eqnarray}

The latest djvu viewer which is djview 4.4 allows the djvu file to be directly exported to pdf format. Just select File -> Export as ... -> Format: ( Destination ) PDF Document. But I fopund out that this didn't quite work in my system. After 99% of conversion was finished I kept getting the error message " Cannot render image. This operation failed ..." . So I went for the alternative. I printed the document using CUPS-PDF driver. Selec print and then PDF from the list of printers available. If PDF printer is not installed then you have to install it. Follow the guideline here http://www.ubuntugeek.com/how-to-create-pdf-documents-in-ubuntu.html or better still if you are using Debian then just open your PMS (package management system ;) Synaptic for Ubuntu ) and install "cups-pdf" .

It is frustrating to rotate in GIMP or that is what I thought because the rotation may cause the layer to extend beyond the bounds of the image. ( http://docs.gimp.org/2.6/ko/gimp-layer-rotate-90.html ) But the trick is to rotate the entire canvas not the layer only. Image -> Transform -> use the rotate options in there to rotate the whole image. Cool ha.

I had a collection of videos that I wanted to write as a video CD so that I could play them in the vcd player in my home. The problem was that they are in avi format and directly writing them to a CD is not playable by a cd player. So I have to make a video CD out of the avi files. I read that Avidemux exports directly to VCD (mpg) format, but what I found out after wasting two whole hours is that the container that Avidemux produces while exporting to VCD format cannot contain audio. That means I was getting mpg files with no audio and Avidemux website suggested adding it manually later. But as it turns as everything in Linux it is a one-step process when done from the command line. I got the following from the Ubuntu forums. ( http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=105781 ) AVI to VCD NTSC ffmpeg -i -target ntsc-vcd PAL ffmpeg -i -target pal-vcd Burn CD K3b File > New Project > New Video CD project For example in my case : ffmpeg -i mymovie.avi -target pal-vcd forvcd.mpg

8 Nov 2009 10:30 PM : I was trying to doze in my office when a phone comes ... "There's a snake near the main reception ..." So begrudgingly I leave to check it out. On reaching the spot I heard some real angry hissing sounds. The reason .. of the room boys got so scared of seeing the (big*) snake that he yelled so loud it got the snake nervous. It must be thinking ... "what to do with these pansy little creatures ... can't go anywhere without them yelling at me ... " Actually this is their interpretation because snakes are deaf . What I realized is that the guy, on seeing our bimbo, jumped so fast and high, that he got the snake into believing that he is another of his kind, but much bigger and scarier. This is what happened. Our boy jumped and viper( equipped with most powerful heat sensors) could see something big darting towards it and got really intimidated. So it reciprocated with some very angry hissing. Now, the real fun begins. The snake is alrea

When I open an email in Thunderbird the back & forward buttons are greyed out. So, I cannot move from one mail to another. So, I searched and came up with a discussion about it here http://sillydog.org/forum/sdt_13568.php . The back & forward buttons are meant for the main window only and do not work in the email window. So, in the main window if I view one mail then another random mail, the back & forward buttonsgo along that order just like the browser history button, from the mail I viewed last to the one the viewed before that (back) or from the mail I viewed next (forward) . I do not want this behavior. And I am sure most Thunderbird users do not want it either. I would prefer if Thunderbird just goes from one mail to immediate next mail. For e.g. if I delete one mail I want it to go to the next mail automatically.

In Linux I had a lot of wallpapers and I wanted a random slideshow of all of them properly scaled to fullscreen. I tried Picasa and F-spot but both were inadequate because they started from the first picture and went on linearly. So, I used FEH instead. $ sudo apt-get install feh Now, to get a slideshow of random random walllpapers stored in a folder the following command is very useful - $ feh -zsdrZFD 15 wallpapers/ Explanation : -z, --randomize When viewing multiple files in a slideshow, -Z, --auto-zoom Zoom picture to screen size in fullscreen mode, -d, --draw-filename Draw the filename at the top-left of the image. -s, --stretch Normally, if an image is smaller than the specified thumbnail size, it will not be enlarged. If this option is set, the image will be scaled up to fit the thumbnail size.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/241449 System: [Hardware] 00:00.0 Host bridge: ATI Technologies Inc Unknown device 7930 <== ATI again iggy wrote on 2008-06-27: (permalink) Yea, it's a problem, with pulseaudio. I have the same problem. When I kill pulse audio and restart both, firefox and exaile, it works. I think it's a bug in pulseaudio. SOLUTION => Fix for Firefox Sound problems on Ubuntu December 19th, 2005 Posted in General http://antonolsen.com/2005/12/19/fix-for-firefox-sound-problems-on-ubuntu/ If you're using Ubuntu and gnome, then odds are that esd is starting and taking control of the soundcard. If you have any apps talking to esd (like your mp3 player) then Firefox won't be able to talk like it usually does to /dev/dsp. To solve this, we just need to tell Firefox to use esd and it can share the audio nicely with other apps. If you're using BASH this should launch firefox with esd support. #export FIREFOX_DSP=esd

To get lots of information about your sound hardware. lspci -vvnn cat /proc/asound/version cat /proc/asound/card0/codec#0 amixer aplay -l lspci killall pulseaudio pulseaudio -v Now, go here for the step-by-step procedure, https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoundTroubleshooting ----- DRAFT -----

I wanted to commit changes I made in my .bashrc without logging out. Easiest was to source it. source ~/.bashrc Now I no longer need to log out and then log in a new terminal to see the changes take effect.

Whenever I tried to start Mathematica 7 from command line, I get the following error and it exits, xset: bad font path element (#23), possible causes are: Directory does not exist or has wrong permissions Directory missing fonts.dir Incorrect font server address or syntax The reason is that my terminal had wrong xset settings. To reset it I just had to press F9 in the terminal and like magic Mathematica started without any more error.

I wanted to search for some lyrics on a site. Evry time I had to type the same keyword site:www.ssdad.com along with the search terms. So I went ahead and modified a search engine already installed to get around this hassle. What I did to create my own custom search engine in Firefox is as follows - I went to the directory home/.mozilla/firefox/asrfafae.default/searchplugins Copy pasted any search plugin already installed. Opened the xml file in a text editor. I modified it to my advantage (the bold ones) - <' SearchPlugin xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/" xmlns:os="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/" '> <' os:ShortName'>musicindiaonline.com<'/os:ShortName '> <'os:Description'>hindi Lyrics Search - MusicIndiaOnline.com<'/os:Description'> <'os:InputEncoding'>ISO-8859-1<'/os:InputEncoding'> <'os:Image width="16" height="16"&#

I an running Firefox 3.5 in Intrepid with 1 GB RAM. The new firefox does not hog much RAM but I noticed it is comparatively sluggish when a lot of tabs are open. This means that it is using the hard disk as its cache. The trouble begins when I try to open a pdf inside Firefox using the Adobe plugin. For small pdf files it is stable. But for large ones Firefox 3.5 freezes outright provided I have quite some tabs open. And once frozen it becomes difficult to kill. The Firefox window disappears but the acrobat window lingers and refuses to budge. I tried to kill it in all possible manner. It turns out that the Firefox was still lurking in the background. Therefore, its child processes could not be terminated. So i had to kill Firefox first. But for the Firefox, normal SIGKILL did not work. Have to brute force kill with signal 9. Then the acrobat window goes away like a nice kid.

I am reading this in lot of Linux journals, magazines and forums that the new ext4 filesystem causes massive data loss in case of desktop manager crashes. For example, if KDE crashes during loading, most of its configuration files are lost. The reason is that ext4 uses late journalling of files meaning changes are committed physically to the disk only after ~ 120 seconds while the metadata is written immediately leading to truncation of files in case of a crash. For ext3 this time was ~ 5 secs. This would be fixed only in a later kernel 2.6.30. So, it is better to avoid ext4 for now. Those who have already done it might want to revert back to avoid data loss. Source : http://www.h-online.com/open/Possible-data-loss-in-Ext4--/news/112821 http://www.h-online.com/open/Kernel-developers-squabble-over-Ext3-and-Ext4--/news/112937

There are some outstanding problems that exists in my Intrepid box which I am trying to solve for quite some time. But every time after spending considerable time on research and ending up with little information I give up. I list them here so that I get to them the moment I have some spare time. Sound record does not work in my box. Have to figure out the fine balance between pulseaudio and ALSA. Webcam (Creative Vista LIVE) works with Cheese without hiccups but fails to work in Skype. VGA problem : I have integrated Radeon X200 with an 8X PCI slot in my comapny PC. So no point adding a PCI card. It would under perform. The problem is that Compiz(Desktop effects in Intrepid) works only with propriety drivers fglrx. But Quake III Arena becomes a slideshow with fglrx running. It has something to do with indirect direct rendering. I is also responsible for the flickers in the video players like mplayer. I have a separate post where I discuss the issues with not having DRI (the one with m

Convert is an extremely powerful and versatile but "simple to use" tool to manipulate images. No need to open each file and operate on them in GIMP or Photoshop. I helps best when I know exactly what to do with my pics. For example, I want to resize all pics from a recent field trip and also give them a border along with a nice tag at the corner like "Goa trip" so that I can recall later in my life where are those pictures from and if I include the date too(which I always do) I have a nice picture diary. I think it i always a good idea to tag pictures with dates. That is where this tool comes in to be so handy. In Photoshop also you can do batch conversion of images. To do the tagging you have to save a group of transformations like adding text at the corners as "Actions" and open files one by one and keep applying that to each of them. So boring. In imagemagick this is accomplished with just one line command. See my shell script at the end for an example

Jaunty has an annoying habit of popping up notifications of available updates in middle of work every few minutes. I quote the changelog of the Ubuntu team - "...Ubuntu 9.04 introduces a change to the handling of package updates, launching update-manager directly instead of displaying a notification icon in the GNOME panel. Users will still be notified of security updates on a daily basis, but for updates that are not security-related, users will only be prompted once a week. ..." This is the default behavior in Jaunty and cannot be turned off from the package manager. To circumvent this use the code. gconftool -s --type bool /apps/update-notifier/auto_launch false

I had screwed up my system(Ubuntu box) by multiple installation of the ATI drivers. I installed the proprierty ATI drivers from the driver file downloaded from their site named ati-driver-installer-9-3-x86.x86_64.run. Then I reinstalled it again by Envy and also by the Hardware drivers section. Result - no display on login. Not even booting into recovery console and fixing X-server worked. The bottomline is never screw with your video drivers. I had to manually remove the fglrx drivers to get back display. 1. Booted into recovery console and fell into root shell. 2. apt-get remove xorg-driver-fglrx 3. But I read in some forum that "....where proprietary drivers are concerned is that Ubuntu/Debian has a conflict resolution system to redirect certain libraries that conflict called dpkg-divert, since binary drivers like ATI and Nvidia especially have a bad habit or creating incompatible libGL.so binaries that blow the system away if they aren't accomodated and removed properly l

-------------- DRAFT ----------------- This is a problem with proprietary ATI drivers ('fglrx') in linux. For most cases open source drivers work great. But for some machines, especially with the combination of AMD64 and onboard ATI VGA card, the GDM fails to load. Take for example, the latest version of Ubuntu, Hardy Heron. It fails to load Gnome for above mentioned configuration. The only way out it seems that is to log into failsafe gnome and install the proprietary 'fglrx' driver. But this drivers comes with it's own set of problems. These include, flicker of gnome-screensaver, improper display in video, mplayer not playing video etc. The flicker in gnome-screensaver is remedied by installing xscreensaver. Why xscreensaver works but gnome-screensaver doesn't is to be discussed in a separate thread. It seems that the proprietary 'fglrx' driver is using some non-default screen ....

I installed flashblock plugin or upgraded to the Ubuntu customized version of the Firefox I do no know what caused that but I stopped having any flash video in Firefox 3.0 even after repeated installs using the deb and tar.gz packages downloaded from the Adobe website. I tried installing Opera and flash worked fine in that. That is when I noticed when running from terminal Firefox is displaying a lot of missing shared object) files, like this : LoadPlugin: failed to initialize shared library /home/aaaaaa/.mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so [libplds4.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory] LoadPlugin: failed to initialize shared library /usr/lib/adobe-flashplugin/libflashplayer.so [libplds4.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory] The idea is that in some way all the soft links to the *.so.1d or *.so.0d files are deleted. So I had to recreate them. The following link helped a lot to that end. https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-mozillatea

This was a huge problem in samba especially in Ubuntu. It seems that the new kernal is to blame. Whenever I issued a command like mount -t smbfs //192.168.87.85/LOTR /share/ -o username=guest,password= I got the error mount error 13 = Permission denied Refer to the mount.cifs(8) manual page (e.g.man mount.cifs) A bug report is found here( https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=119766 ). And a possible solution is given here.( http://vijayk.blogspot.com/2008/09/cifs-mount-error-13-permission-denied.html ) However it didn't help when I gave this command, mount -t smbfs //192.168.87.85/LOTR /share/ -o username=guest,password= After a lot of experimenting I realised that it fails sometimes if there is no password specified. So I added a password to the Windows share and gave the following command. mount -t smbfs //192.168.87.85/LOTR /share/ -o username=guest,password=gjf67g,domain=MSHOME It worked !!! For many other win shares I didn't specify password and the first command